On Mon, Jul 03, 2006 at 08:23:50PM -0500, Luis Rodrigo Gallardo Cruz wrote: > Having recently taken over maintaining sawfish, I ran lintian -I on it > and got > I: sawfish: arch-dep-package-has-big-usr-share 4848kB 90% > > which refers me to > http://www.debian.org/doc/developers-reference/ch-best-pkging-practices#s-bpp-archindepdata > > ... However, if the size of the data is considerable, consider splitting > > it out into a separate, architecture-independent package > > ("_all.deb") ... > > Now, I plainly see that in this case 'the size of the data' is > 'considerable' and will work on splitting the package. But ... is > there some sort of general guideline on when to do this? > > Creating more binary packages certainly has some sort of cost (The > size of the packages file, at least). How do I estimate those costs? > How do I estimate the savings gained from splitting? > (number of archs) * (size of _all.deb)? One way is just to try it and see :)
One the one hand, it is somewhat annoying for users to have to install a bajillion tiny packages on each machine; at the same time it is nice to not include the same data in the archive 12 times. In your case, the arch-dep package will depend on the -indep one, so it doesn't cost the user much at all. How big is your /usr/share/ ? I would say that splitting out only a megabyte is probably not worth it (though it does save ~11MB on the archive), but splitting 10MB surely is. Justin -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
