Guidelines for creating subpackages?

Patrice Dumas pertusus at free.fr
Sat Dec 1 23:42:33 UTC 2007


On Sat, Dec 01, 2007 at 09:23:26AM -0700, Richi Plana wrote:
> 
> 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.

A guideline won't solve that issue either. Guidelines that don't follow
best practices won't be followed by knowledgable packagers.

> 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).

The point is not here. A guideline cannot be easily done, because there
are pro and cons and the final weighting is dependent on the specific
case. To take the vtk example, the runtime packages are split, to allow
for fine-grained dependencies, and the -devel is monolithic, because
many users assume that the devel package gives all that it needed to
develop with the package, and on a devel platform fine grained
dependencies are not an big issue. Still if the devel package was split
it could also be acceptable, so there is definitely no easy solution,
and it is best left to the packager (except in extreme cases, be it in
split or in monolithic).

--
Pat




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