Package: general Severity: wishlist
There is an annoying flaw in the design of the Debian package management system, which means that packages cannot be partially installed. This limits the flexibility of Debian based systems when it comes to mixed installations or installation on embedded or resource constrained systems. For any particular package, the full set of binary components, optional documentation, and unused foreign language support files will be installed by the package management system. This flaw also means that components of bundled packages, such as the coreutils suite cannot be individually selected or omitted. This is particularly annoying if the system installer wants to replace one of the components with a customized version. A fix would be to make it possible to select individual files for installation from within a package. Other work includes splitting packages into daughter packages, the parent package being dependent on all daughters, but allowing the option of just selecting individual daughter packages, eg: coreutils depends on coreutils-fileutils and coreutils-fileutils depends on coreutils-fileutils-head, coreutils-fileutils-split etc, etc. Possibly introduce a packaging policy (this is a draft): Each stand alone binary file should be individually packaged, rather than bundled with other stand alone binary files. It is policy that internationalized (non-english) components are packaged separately to the core package. For example, a package foobar, would have its french documentation in a separate foobar-fr package. Packages should not install cruft on the system. This means that a package should not install a foreign language file, unless the system has been explicitly configured to support that foreign language. Mark. -- System Information: Debian Release: lenny/sid APT prefers testing APT policy: (500, 'testing') Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 2.6.25-2-486 Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory ANSI_X3.4-1968) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]