On Mon, Oct 01, 2007 at 05:35:36PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > Nikolaus Schulz <microschulz@web.de> writes: > > > Upstream has provided about half a dozen, separate utility packages, and > > at least two link against the said libraries. One could argue if these > > packages *should* be separate, but they are. So I guess the libraries > > aren't private package-wise, and this isn't possible, right? > > While with non-free software you can't really change the binaries, you > definitely *can* change the packaging structure however you'd like. Does > it make sense to have six different packages? Or is this really one thing > that should be shipped as a single package? Wouldn't merging the packages require some patch management system? I hoped to get along without such a thing. Actually I cannot yet say if these packages should be separate. I'm still figuring out their inner mechanics. They are quite complex, and the documentation is sparse to non-existing. The driver packages for one printer series contain 11 executables; they support both cups and classic lpd. Most of them are not intended to be run directly by the user, but are chained in the background. I'm not done figuring that all out. For a start, I have packaged them as-is (where possible). > > Also, it would be nice to package the libraries separately, since this > > allows to have as much of the GPL licenced code[1] go into contrib, and > > only the libs themselves go into non-free. But this runs into the > > shlibs problem... > > Eh, I can see why this would be nice but I don't think it's a particularly > important feature. There isn't that much difference between contrib and > non-free in practice. The voice of reason... :-) Okay, accepted. > > I suspect there is no clean solution here; but I wonder what's best. > > What do you think? > > I'm not sure I understand the situation well enough to really recommend > something. How big are each of these packages? How big? Byte-wise they're small, my current GPL deb's are <100k each. The binary library packages eat 700k for one printer series. Hmm, I guess I should mention another problem. Unfortunately one of these binary libraries has a path hard-coded: it expects private data files in /usr/lib/bjlib. I'm not sure, is this fatal? What is the best course of action here? Your advice is very much appreciated. Thanks! Nikolaus
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