Re: Spliting packages between pkg and pkg-data

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

sean finney <seanius@seanius.net> writes:

> just throwing a quick $0.02 in here,
>
> On Wed, Nov 23, 2005 at 01:51:30PM +0100, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
>> > Well, being able to read the documentation (including the man page) of a
>> > binary without requiring the binary to be installed is a good thing
>> > IMHO. Especially for big and complex software that is likely to be
>> > split to pkg and pkg-data...
>> 
>> I prefer to have a 1:1 correlation between binaries and manpages. But
>> that is just me.
>
> i think the idea is that if you have the package providing the binary
> installed, you implicitly have the -data package installed.  so, does
> it matter that if you manually chose to do so, you could have manpages
> for binaries not on your system, as long as you could never have
> binaries on your system without their manpages?

For one thing you get rid of the lintian warning about a binary
without manpage. :)

>> Other things would be cron jobs, inetd entries, init.d scripts. I'm
>> not sure that putting the init.d script into foo-data is the best
>> idea.
>
> there are cases where having these files in a seperate package can
> be a good thing.  for example, two packages i have direct experience
> with (nagios and mysql) both profit from having a single "-common"
> (arch: all) package which shares init scripts, web server
> configs, etc between multiple server-providing binary packages
> (nagios-{text,mysql,pgsql}, mysql-server-{4.1,5.0}).
>
> the proviso is that a little more care has to be taken to make sure that
> some of these things behave in the absence of the "binary" package.
> policy already states that init scripts (9.3.2) and cronjobs (9.5)
> must do so, the other stuff is a little more context dependant.

Exactly. Having it in a different package means more care has to be
taken. Since most people are lazy that shouldn't be done without a
good reason. Overall what does 1K more or less matter. foo-data
packages are for MiB big themes and similar.

>
>
> 	sean

MfG
        Goswin