Hey, On Thu, 2005-07-07 at 18:20, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >On Thu, Jul 07, 2005 at 08:31:55PM +0100, Peter C. Tribble wrote: > > > >> Why on earth does gnome/jds come in 200 odd separate packages? Does the > >> split of files make any sense? > > > >It does, but it's reasonably arcane, and like Casper said, it suffers > >greatly from the lack of good tools to manage it. > > > >Each glob of functionality can have up to five packages associaged with it > >(for instance, SUNWgnome-vfs) -- -devel, -devel-share, -root, and -share. > > > Is there really a good reason, though, to make GNOME more than five > packages? As long as we don't do RPM style patches, who would install > only M out of N GNOME packages (not to pick on GNOME, we all offend here).
Some people don't need any of the devel packages. Most people don't need accessibilty. Some sysadmins may not want games or certain applets installed. We certainly don't want them to start deleting files belonging to packages. > What model is behind this granularity? Oh, I can answer that. In this model packages represent functional units of the desktop. The idea was that GNOME components come and go all the time, but there are certain things in a desktop environment that will always be there. For example, you will always have a window manager, be it sawmill, sawfish or metacity. The same with the other packages: a file manager, a text editor, platform libs, component framework, etc. This level of granularity hides the complexity behind the changeable nature of GNOME components. If we had gone for one (or five, as dictated by ARC, see Danek's mail on this) package per GNOME component, which is the Linux model, we would have had SUNWlibrep*, SUNWrep-gtk* and SUNWsawfish* packages covering the window manager back in the GNOME 2.0 times. Then we would have obsoleted all of these in GNOME 2.6 and have SUNWmetacity instead. Doesn't seem like a good idea to me, but some may disagree. In some cases ARC suggested splitting packages so that sysadmins can decide whether they want that feature installed or not. One example for this is gnome-applets, which is one component in GNOME (and one package in the Linux world), but we split it into multimedia applets, utilities, intranet, internet and "fun" applets. Having 5 packages for GNOME would be a nightmare for developers and build engineers: the 139 components in the GNOME stack have lots and lots of inter-dependencies. To be able to build a certain component, normally all dependencies have to be installed in their final location in the filesystem. Even the current grouping of components makes it tricky sometimes to get the build set up correctly. But I don't think we only need 5 packages either: that's what clusters are for. We currently have the following GNOME clusters: - GNOME Base Libraries - GNOME Runtime - GNOME Applications - Mozilla - Evolution - GNOME Accessibility - GNOME Extras - GNOME Generic Libraries Developer - GNOME Developer Packages - Mozilla Developer cluster - Evolution Developer We're actually moving into the direction of lower granularity so that rebuilding a package doesn't take ages and it's also closer to the Linux model. Hope this explains, Laca _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
