[arch-general] Fwd: [signoff] [extra] postfix 3.5.9-1 (WHY?)

[Emil Velikov]

On Sat, 23 Jan 2021 at 23:46, Maarten de Vries via arch-general
<arch-general at lists.archlinux.org> wrote:
>
> Hey,
>
> On Sun, 24 Jan 2021 at 00:02, David C. Rankin via arch-general <
> arch-general at lists.archlinux.org> wrote:
>
> > Archdevs,
> >
> >   Why are we splitting postfix by backend? Currently the package is only
> > 1.5M
> > total. Why would we want to fragment postfix backend capability into
> > separate
> > packages? With 1T+ average drive size the additional fragmentation doesn't
> > make any space savings sense.
> >
>
> If you want to do a fair estimation of space saving, you also have to take
> into account the size of the dependencies for each back-end.
>
> To get an idea, I ran `pacman -S postfix` in a clean chroot, and the result
> is 41.36 MB of extra disk usage (ignoring the package cache), 36.26 MB of
> which is for different backends (pcre and sqlite were already pulled in by
> the base package). Whether that space matters or not depends on a lot of
> things, but I think its nice that you can avoid pulling in unnecessary
> dependencies.
>
Allow me to put forward an alternative idea:

It should be fairly easy, to have the best of both worlds by demoting
the separate backend dependencies to optdepends.
This way there is no splitting of a trivial package and anyone wishing
to utilise backend Foo, should already have it installed and
configured.

HTH
-Emil