I'd have to say that when presented in that manner, I agree that unnesecary splits seem bad. it's a tough issue. on one hand, we could split, but then a user would have to think more. may need a utility and not have it. on the other hand, if we don't split, there are more binaries on a system, and that means more chance for a user to break something. then again, if an arch user breaks something, it's his or her own fault, since we don't claim to be an entry level distro. then again since we're not an entry level distro, we should give a little more thought to security, and system performance, IE not over-crowding the system, etc. there are alot of pros and cons for each way. however, I have to say this: if we split, then aurbuild needs to be included in pacman-utils, or at least in a package (like aur-utils or something) of it's own. On 1/8/07, Jason Chu <jason@archlinux.org> wrote:
On Mon, 8 Jan 2007 17:51:22 -0500 "Dan McGee" <dpmcgee@gmail.com> wrote:
On 1/8/07, Jason Chu <jason@archlinux.org> wrote:
Not to be contradictory, but what does this gain us? It seperates things, sure, but so what? What problem are we solving by splitting things up?
Part of it was just putting the idea out there and seeing what people thought. However, I think it would follow the KISS policy a bit more, separating package installation from package building. You don't need to install Apache to browse the web (obviously this is not quite that extreme, but helps clarify my point).
-Dan
I would argue that simple would be not splitting. A second package means more thought: "why can't I build a package? I have pacman installed!"; more maintenance: <aaron>: "Ok, I've got a new version of pacman, now I have to update pacman and pacman-utils".
It's true that you don't need to install apache to browse the web, but you do have to install the freeciv server to get the freeciv client, mplayer to get mencoder, sshd to get ssh, and tightvnc to get vncserver.
It's usually been our policy not to split if we can help it. Some reasons for splitting are package size (especially when a package is a dependency of another package (see libmysqlclient & postgresql-libs)) or a split upstream.
Maybe I'm wrong though. Rpm and dpkg are split in such a way, but they're also huge projects.
Jason
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