On 9/22/07, Alexandre Moreira <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > What if we could add a way that the -dev, -doc, -* packages are really > sub-packages, instead of a different package. And one could have a > list of standardized sub packages he wants to always install ?
This is a nice idea, and I thought about it myself, but it has a huge downside: it makes AUR user contributions a pain to maintain. The AUR works in such a simple way only because we don't have split packages. We don't need to be debian maintainers to contribute a PKGBUILD, we don't need to grok the whole essence of the software, which part of it relates to its dependencies and how. Think about it: what if you chose to install -dev packages (one of the reasons why I left debian) and didn't include gcc-dev in the makedepends, but just gcc like you do now? It wouldn't work for all the people that don't want -dev by default. The result: a real mess. And this is just a simple example. My opinion is we should allow split packages only for controlled parts: the ones that come to my mind are -docs and -data. They shouldn't contain binaries, headers or such, which should all be included in the main package; this should keep it KISS enough for everyone, allowing for big unnecessary updates being cut in size. After all, when I came to arch I was aware of its package policy and I accepted it. Since a distribution is for a great part focused around packages and their related policies, if I don't like it at all I'm not going to ask everyone for a major change, I'll just change distribution. I think many of you that want to turn arch in just another i686-optimized debian can just look somewhere else, and let arch be arch. Corrado _______________________________________________ arch mailing list arch@archlinux.org http://archlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/arch
