Okay, so a metapackage does not work. I successfully got it to build into a metapackage, install properly as a metapackage, and now have a meta, an hours, and a minutes install files.

Problem is, it still only loads one of the plugins after install. This time it is the hours plugin. I would rather it load neither to just be less confusing. At least with hours there is no "half-display" because it depends on minutes being loaded to get its information.

I'm guessing this method is of no use to anyone, since it is just more work installing more packages. I wish there were a command or a dbus method to load a plugin without having it in the statusbar.conf file under ~/.osso/hildon-desktop

Hmm, that gives me a horribly clever, hackish, plan. I could just have one entry for the entire clock that loads the minutes plugin, then have the minutes plugin manually load an hours entry in the statusbar.conf file. It could remove it on unload too. There are potential problems, but it could be workable...