Hi, I'm not a debian developer yet (and seems like I won't even attempt till I feel that new maintainers are welcome), but I just wanted to comment on how a re-organization might be done.
First of all, I'd like to state that dpkg system is all very well thought. Speaking of modularity, package management system is meant to provide it. However, making the base system as tight and as versatile as possible, I think has it benefits. Hmm, like how a small and open microkernel is the first condition for a modular OS core, the base system must be very selective about what is contained, and how new "module"s are introduced. BTW, keeping the source code of the base system in an integrated way is also useful, the base source could be responsible for defining some system characteristics and the boot environment. This might also make some base configuration possible: baseconf? I'm not sure, but it could help porting to other kernels as well... Another issue is the division of Debian archives and development into logical sections such that development gets a speed-up. In that respect, a minimal change to the current organization is necessary. Otherwise, the delays could even get longer. A good place to start is the profiles one can choose for dselect at install time. It looks like the tasks you can choose from are some gue collections of package. My proposal is throwing out an is-a/part-of hierarchy into those tasks. That way, the class diagram could account for the logical organization. The original system that assigns each package a maintainer need not be changed. Suppose that we allow the smallest leaf "task" to consist of 16 packages at most. Then what is required will be to assign each task a "release-maintainer". I am aware that it is pretty rough at the time I write (and think). Nevertheless it might be a good start. (By leaf task, I mean those tasks which don't contain instances of others) Those tasks which have others as their parts or inherit from others may build a categorization that is both sensible and manageable. It seems to me that both part-of and is-a hierarchies (allowing multiple inheritance) is necessary to break down Debian into comprehensible units. In addition to this, such a categorization would be vertical to main/contrib/non-free separation ++++-+++-+++-++-++-++--+---+----+----- --- -- - - + Eray "eXa" Ozkural . . . . . . + CS, University of Bilkent,Ankara ^ . o . . | mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] . ^ . .