Guidelines for creating subpackages?

Patrice Dumas pertusus at free.fr
Sun Dec 2 10:42:30 UTC 2007


On Sun, Dec 02, 2007 at 09:53:45AM +0100, Joachim Frieben wrote:
> 
> First of all, vtk-devel at least pulls in vtk-python, vtk-tcl, vtk-qt,
> tcl, tk, qt beyond packages that were already required by the base
> system. Are these packages specific to developers? I doubt so.
> Moreover, what you call developers are not necessarily hardcore
> developers of the package under consideration, so it might be simple
> people who just need/want to build an application based upon the VTK
> toolkit.

Though it is not easy to know by advance which binding they will need.

> As a matter of fact, Fedora does not even include a single application
> that uses any of vtk, vtk-python, vtk-qt, vtk-tcl [well, vtk-examples
> and vtk-testing but that probably doesn't count].

In fact paraview uses vtk, though for right reasons still uses an
internal version, but hopefully one day will use the system vtk. But
more generally you cannot predict which package will use which library 
or binding. You have to package as if your library could be used even 
if it is not currently. There are a lot of software that are still 
not in fedora.

> Apart from using 3rd party binaries, any person interested in the vtk
> package necessarily is what you call 'developer'. So, the term 'user'
> essentially loses any meaning in this context.
> Finally, the case of the plplot package shows that my initial request
> is by no means exotic, and I maintain my point that it would be sign
> of userfriendliness not to impose unneeded packages like the ones
> enumerated above on a user of the vtk package.

You mean plplot requires vtk-devel? Or plplot-devel requires vtk-devel?
Runtime fine grained dependencies are very desirable but devel fine
grained dependencies are optional nad in the case of vtk, I think that
it is best left to the packager, and I think that most vtk users expect all
the binding to be there when installing vtk-devel.

--
Pat




More information about the fedora-devel-list mailing list