On 7/7/05, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Is there really a good reason, though, to make GNOME more than five > packages? As long as we don't do RPM style patches, who would install > only M out of N GNOME packages (not to pick on GNOME, we all offend here).
>From an end user standpoint, having them split up based on the program or library being packaged is very beneficial. For example, recently I wanted to upgrade metacity to 2.8.13 from the 2.8.0 that SUN distributes. But, I discovered that SUN made startup-notification (a library I also needed to upgradae) part of SUNWgnome-libs, and rather than being able to update just startup-notification. I had to update startup-notification, and rebuild every single thing in SUNWgnome-libs which was several libraries instead of one. Splitting things up into packages with clear boundaries (i.e. only one program or library per package) makes things much easier for the end-user to replace if they need to. For example, if I need metacity with composite enabled, I could just recompile and install that single package. >From an administrator point, making sure that GNOME games and certain gnome programs are in their own packages instead of one big GNOME package would let me remove GNOME games while keeping the desktop and so on. There is probably little use beyond the above though for a commercial Solaris release to be as granular about things as I would like. However, for an OpenSolaris distribution the ability for a user to easily replace specific components of their system would be highly desireable. I know I would certainly like it. It's especially beneficial to community developers who want to be able to work on and experiment with fixes for specific components of their system. An example of this might be my recent forays into hacking metacity. Having the ability to work with the source, compile it, run and test it until I find it acceptable, then repackage it just like SUN has it and replace their installation is valuable to me. It also gives me a way to provide packages to others with my particular fixes or changes rather easily. -- Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
