Alexander Skwar wrote:
>
> What I'm suggesting is, that documentations are to be split up into seperate
> packages. This would allow to slim down hard disk foot print of Mandrake
> considerably without having to cut functionality.
>
> Please consider my suggestion and share your thoughts about this, as I'm
> interested about it!
This logically leads to a suggestion to package all the rpms of a
certain product in their own product subdirectory of the distribution
trees. This is already beginning to happen with the 'unsupported'
tree.
Advantages:
1. All the top-level RPMs of a certain product are co-located. As
it is now, component RPMs can be anywhere in the flat tree name space
with no clue what belongs to what. This is very careless.
2. Eventually this directory name, or a special text file in the
subdirectory, could become the carrier for product version
information rather than each RPM in its name. This would require
all the RPMs of a product to always be built together - a good
thing. The advantage here is that rsync's excellent patching mode
could be used directly to update RPMs since the RPM name does not
change, only the subdirectory wrapper or the vesion text file.
3. To update a certain product, set to its tree subdirectory and
just do rpm -Uvh *.rpm We would need a new rpm exclusion mechanism
to optionally avoid installing '*-doc-*' or '*-devel-*' RPMs, for
example.
4. Further cross-dependencies, eg kde2.1 needs qt2, could be
indicated by another text file in this subdirectory in a format
recognised by the installer (and rpm?). Symbolic links could also
be used, but these don't survive propagation across mirrors and
downloads too well.
--
Regards,
Ron. [AU]
