Guidelines for creating subpackages?

Richi Plana myfedora at richip.dhs.org
Sat Dec 1 16:23:26 UTC 2007


On Sat, 2007-12-01 at 13:11 +0100, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 01, 2007 at 09:17:29AM +0100, Joachim Frieben wrote:
> > I have recently submitted a bug report for the "vtk" package, see
> > 
> >   https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=388211
> > 
> > Shouldn't there be a standard policy how to proceed in such cases? The procedure adopted in the "plplot" case obviously appears more appealing to me ..
> 
> A standard policy is not desirable in my opinion. More subpackages
> may allow for better granularity, but the user has to install
> and sometime know about more packages. There is also added 
> packaging complexity. So definitely the packager choice.

Wait, wait, wait. Are you saying that we've been talking about Fedora
and how it's a democracy, how we're trying to give users a choice
through spins even though Fedora chooses defaults ... and packagers are
free to ignore users' petitions?

The user doesn't HAVE to know about the subpackages in order for them to
be installed when needed. That's what we're supplying the needed
information for to yum to be able to make it make good decisions.

Packagers are responsible to the users, too, and a lack of a guideline
will guarantee that issues like this will come back again and again.

As a packager (or one-in-progress), I would WANT guidelines. I'm doing
this for the community, and not just to scratch my own personal itch (a
point sorely lacking in many open-source projects).
--

Richi Plana




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