Re: On Debian and Fedora experiences

[Rex Dieter <rdieter math unl edu>]

Matthew Miller wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 04, 2006 at 08:51:26AM -0500, Jesse Keating wrote:
>> A far better solution is to split the libraries that would use say aalib
>> into a subpackage so that you can install the base package without
>> needing aalib,
>> and choose to install the subpackage that might pull in the aalib dep. 
>> The OLPC project has helped to identify a lot of these scenarios and to
>> split out functionality as such.
> 
> Or not. This may be useful for OLPC, but aalib is, what, 164k? Is that
> really worth the overhead of a zillion more subpackages?

I think Jesse was just using aalib as an example.  Packagers certainly need
to weight the advantages and disadvantages to subpkgs, and where
significant dependency/space savings would warrant their usage.

-- Rex