Fuppes: Package Names and the Separation of a Project into Packages
Hi mentors,
Recently I have been developing on fuppes and decided to start packaging it; there was an existing but rather dead ITP for fuppes here: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=426048
(Before I go on I jsut want to say that I have read the entire debian policy (and a few sections more than once); so while still new I hope I will understand any references to the policy)
Ulrich designed fuppes so that support for extra components would come in the form of plugins; these plugins manifest as .so files that come with the project. As a result, when the original package was written for fuppes, there is a package called 'fuppes' which contains core functionality. And many extra packages which each install a single .so file as a plugin resulting in the following packages:
$ ls *.deb -1
fuppes_0.654-1_i386.deb
fuppes-core-plugin-presentation_0.654-1_i386.deb
fuppes-database-plugin-mysql_0.654-1_i386.deb
fuppes-database-plugin-sqlite3_0.654-1_i386.deb
fuppes-decoder-plugin-flac_0.654-1_i386.deb
fuppes-dev_0.654-1_all.deb
fuppes-encoder-plugin-twolame_0.654-1_i386.deb
fuppes-metadata-plugin-dlna_0.654-1_i386.deb
fuppes-metadata-plugin-exiv2_0.654-1_i386.deb
fuppes-metadata-plugin-libavformat_0.654-1_i386.deb
fuppes-metadata-plugin-libmp4v2_0.654-1_i386.deb
fuppes-metadata-plugin-magick_0.654-1_i386.deb
fuppes-metadata-plugin-taglib_0.654-1_i386.deb
fuppes-transcode-plugin-ffmpeg_0.654-1_i386.deb
fuppes-transcode-plugin-magick_0.654-1_i386.deb
libfuppes0_0.654-1_i386.deb
$
I look at the sheer number of packages there and think that, although it provides alot of freedom as to what you install on your machine, it might be too fine grained; maybe we need less packages and every package installs more (or even a single package with everything)? But I'm not sure and that is why I am asking here.
What should we do in this case? Should I try and get all of those packages into debian or should I group them into larger but fewer packages?
Thanks,
Robert
P.S. It is possible that there is a better way to provide this kind of thing. If so please let me know and I'll look into that instead.
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