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