On Sun, Oct 29, 2006 at 12:58:45AM +0200, Jan Engelhardt wrote: > > > >With the size and price of today's hard-drives I see no advantage in > >splitting any packages. > > Not everyone has a fat 250G drive, esp. educational institutions > have older boxes in service.
That's right but I'd strongly recommend not to implement such a mechanism by messing up each and every package by manually splitting them into subpackages that have a distinction only in a pure technical reason rather than a semantical one. I'd recommend instead to enhance the package manager with a mechanism to configure it filtering away files based on a pattern that can be configured for a specific instance. That way you can use this feature with each and every package without requiring the packager to consider this on creation of the package. We use a similar technology (although not with RPM) in a heterogeneous cluster environment to share common files between different architectures without duplicating them for each and every platform and without manually marking these files/packages as being noarch packages. That way you can also omit creation of something messy things like these *-32bit packages on biarch systems. Instead you just install the x86 and x86_64 package on a x86_64 system and the intelligence in the package manager makes sure that a) you have both library versions installed, b) always get the x86_64 binary when calling a binary (unless specified otherwise), and c) shared files are present on the system only once. Actually the technology is more generic so that you can install for instance x86_64, x86, Sparc, and Alpha packages on a shared volume and the package mapper automatically creates a view to this single volume to make each system seeing only the files of relevance for their architecture. There is another advantage of the very same technology: With some more rule patterns it allows installation of multiple versions of a package allowing the system to see all (incompatible) versions of a library but only one version of the development headers. Robert -- Robert Schiele Dipl.-Wirtsch.informatiker mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] "Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur."
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