[pacman-dev] pacman packaging

[Jason Chu]

On Mon, 8 Jan 2007 17:51:22 -0500
"Dan McGee" <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 1/8/07, Jason Chu <jason at 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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