Re: Spliting packages between pkg and pkg-data

[Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>]

Nicolas Boullis <nboullis@debian.org> writes:

> On Sun, Nov 20, 2005 at 12:13:48PM +0100, Bill Allombert wrote:
>> Hello Debian developers,
>> 
>> When doing research about circular-deps, I looked at a lot of packages
>> that are split between a binary package and a data package. This is a
>> good thing since this reduce the total siez of the archive, however
>> there are simple rules that should be followed:
>> 
>> 3) Keep the files that 'signal' executables in the same package than the
>>    executable (e.g. menu file, program manpage).
>
> Why? I agree that it menu files and manpages are generally not that 
> large, but what would it break to have them in pkg-data?
> (I would consider it strange to have such files out of the main pkg 
> package, but it looks policy-compliant as far as I can see...)
>
>
> Nicolas

foo depends on foo-data. But foo-data does NOT depend on foo.

So an "apt-get install foo-data", while being useless, is consistent
for dpkg. After that you would end up with a menu entry for foo but no
foo binary.

MfG
        Goswin