On Thu, Jul 07, 2005 at 08:31:55PM +0100, Peter C. Tribble wrote:
> Why on earth does gnome/jds come in 200 odd separate packages? Does the
> split of files make any sense?
It does, but it's reasonably arcane, and like Casper said, it suffers
greatly from the lack of good tools to manage it.
Each glob of functionality can have up to five packages associaged with it
(for instance, SUNWgnome-vfs) -- -devel, -devel-share, -root, and -share.
-root is necessary to maintain the split between / and /usr packages
(for zones and diskless).
-devel is there so that people installing a metacluster smaller than
SUNWCprog (Developer) can do away with this. Whether this is a
substantial savings with today's disk sizes is debatable. It's also a
holdover from how RPMs are typically done.
-share is there in case someone ever wants to be able to mount
/usr/share from a cross-platform store. Traditionally, Solaris has
done a poor job of separating architecture independent data from arch
dependent data, but occasionally, we try.
-devel-share ... I'm not sure about this, as all of the files in -devel
are architecture independent, though some of them have some vague
possibility of containing different data depending on the architecture
for which they were intended -- .pc and .h files, generally are in
-devel, and documentation in -devel-share. I'm not sure if this is a
useful distinction, or at least, useful for all the packages to which
it's applied.
Hope that makes some sense, even if you don't agree that it's the right way
to go. Glynn, or maybe Alan, might be able to offer further words on why
they're done that way -- maybe "The ARC made us do it". ;-)
Danek
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