on Sun, Aug 04, 2002 at 05:30:12PM +0200, Jérôme Marant wrote about Re: Dock Apps packaging: > Josselin Mouette <josselin.mouette@ens-lyon.org> writes: > > > Le dim 04/08/2002 à 09:59, Sean 'Shaleh' Perry a écrit : > > > >> I currently run two dock apps -- wmmixer (I used to package it) and wmx10. > >> Most people I know who use them run 2 or 3. Having 10, 20, more installed for > >> those 2 is plain silly. > > > > This is your situation. But many of our users will first try 10 or more > > dockapps and then keep those they like, without removing the others from > > their system. Also, being finely grained is a good thing, but packages > > in the 50-200 KB range are maybe a bit too finely grained, especially if > > there are many of them. > > There has already been such a discussion about GNOME applets > that Christian Marillat wanted to package. > > I recalled that everyone agreed that neither having one package per > applet nor all applets in one package was a solution. I do not remember this discussion, but I do not agree. I think there _is_ a solution. Basically, this discussion is about where the borders of a package are or should be i.e. why do we package, what belongs together etc.. To answer this question, you can take different points of view: (1) developer perspective: having the finest possible granularity is best for maintenance purposes example: suppose several little apps are packaged together; one of the apps needs a bugfix; the whole package will be stepped up, will actually need to be retested (even the apps that did not change, because the binary package has changed); a user using just one app from this monolithic package would need to upgrade the package because one app he does not use needed a bugfix; what if another new little applet joins the group? Adding a new package is certainly better than adding it to the other monolithic package (extension & modularity versus change & monolithic) (2) user perspective: ease of selecting things: it might indeed be more difficult to select some little apps from a large list, but with things like the task packages, meta packages bundling together things to ease selection, this should not be a problem anymore To conclude, I would choose to have things packaged separately and have other packages to group packages that are often used together. > -- > Jérôme Marant > > http://marant.org -- lenaerts.frank@pandora.be Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." -- Henry Spencer
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