Peter Tribble wrote: > On Sat, May 17, 2008 at 2:22 PM, Lewis Thompson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> The benefits to these more fine grained packages are obvious: we can >> upgrade totem and rhythmbox independently of each other (and we make >> it easy for third-parties to release updated packages) >> > > They can be upgraded independently of each other trivially in either the old > or the new way. With Solaris/SVR4, you just release a patch containing the > changed files; with IPS you issue a new version of the whole package and let > IPS just update the files that have changed. What you can't do with IPS (but > could with SVR4+patches) is to arbitrarily freeze either component. > > >> The drawbacks... I'm hard pushed to think of any >> > > More packages to manage is bad, as is the diversity of installed > configurations. > With bad package manager only. And if we're pursuing popularity -- diversity cannot be avoided. Sure it's somehow harder to support, but it's possible to stand against this issue > The only reason to split components into separate packages is if it > makes sense to install one component but not the other. (For your example, > this may make sense, of course.) > I can imagine at least two more reasons: 1. when required part may be provided by different packages (imagine some tool using... say, sound encoder. It may use some helper provided by authors or third-party tool, like lame or ogg encoder) 2. splitting package into arch-dep and arch-indep ones. Imagine game which comes with 500 MB of data (levels, music etc). With two architectures, sparc and x86, it's better to have 10 MB sparc package (game), 10 MB x86 binary package (game) and 500 MB architecture-independent package which can be installed on both types of machines (game-data) > We really need to reduce the number of units of installed software that > we need to manage, not increase that number. (The unit doesn't have to > be the package, of course - we could have groupings above the package > level. From my system administrator experience it's better to have minimal required subset installed -- because it's easier to manage. OTOH, grouping software in large pieces makes it easier to manage for maintainers, but to reach success on the market we should fulfill customers' meeds, shouldn't we?
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