On Friday 23 August 2002 03:05 pm, Josselin Mouette wrote: > Second, there is the famous... TADA ! Packages file size ! > While this shouldn't be a limit for what we package, we can't increase > its size indefinitely. This one of the reasons why the gnome applets > were put in a single package. I think the dockapps problem is a good > example to think about what to do with the Packages file : we can "save" > tens of packages by using bundles, or increase their number by a score. > So we have to decide now what to do : either we begin to save some > packages to avoid a too big Packages file, or we find NOW another way of > downloading the debs list. If we keep the things the way they are going, > APT will probably be unusable in sarge+1. >
The problem is most packages in Debian will not benefit from this style of packaging. So you take 10,040 packages and have 10,000 packages. No real win. If we start heading down this road we might as well kill all of the -doc packages and stop splitting libraries into libfoo and libfoo-dev. We could also remove all of the perl modules since CPAN also has them. Or remove all of the Java packages since we still don't have a free Java implementation. Then we could just choose KDE or GNOME and remove the other one along with things like ROX. And so on. But that is not the Debian I joined and I doubt that is really what you want either. I agree there is a problem with how we currently deal with our packages and the archive. But it is a techical problem requiring a technical solution. Making a few bundle packages is just like putting a bandage on a gaping wound.