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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