Re: several things
E. Branderhorst writes:
>Perhaps standard debian.rules is too difficult, but I'll try to keep
>all my debian.rules the same that's for sure (I hope). Brings me
>quickly to another subject: what is wanted and what can be left
>out. As you probably noticed I uploaded a few easy to build packages
>which can be created quite easily by an average system administrator.
>Dirk Eddelbuettel mailed me that he was in doubt if packages like
>untex (one file) and xypic (a bunch of (la)tex files and fonts) should
>be in the debian system. I agree that those weren't a great milestone
>in programming or package-building but I did those because I like them
>and I like to install them easily and thought other people might have
>the same opinion on this and might never heard of some usefull package
>and now they know.
>
>To make a long story short, does the debian community (or the devels)
>want such packages? If not, don't flame me but say it gently. If so,
>should the core system being seperated from the contributed (optional)
>stuff? Let me know.
It's a shame we can't ever have any accurate way of collecting figures
on how many people use Debian as a whole, never mind individual
packages.
Packages consisting of a single file do seem a little on the small
side. Perhaps in the case of untex there's a place for a package
consisting of other markup-stripping programs (if there are unhtml or
unroff programs, those would go in it too, for example.)
>Another one: can the copyrights be compressed, or put on disk more
>efficiently. It's has no function "?" letting them reside their, but
>they are consuming space. Can they be stored in one compressed file,
>or should it be plain text. Perhaps a copyright program could be made
>to interface a compressed database with copyright messages.
I think you'll find many of packages require that the copyright
message be distributed with them. Putting them in the archive itself
is surely the easiest way to ensure this happens.
That's not the only reason.
sfere:richard$ for i in /usr/doc/copyright/*
> do
> test -L $i || cat $i
> done | gzip -9c | wc --bytes
71727
sfere:richard$
Perhaps for the full distribution this might work out at nearer 100Kb;
and you can't just download it once - what happens when a new package
is added to the distribution? If its copyright message isn't
distributed with it, you've suddenly got another huge great file to
download, conceivably several times the size of the package itself.
>Another two: perhaps packages shouldn't install if no copyright was
>included, unless you force them to do anyway. The maintainer should
>take care of this but perhaps this is a protection of a proper
>"debian" system?
I think the current situation is simpler and saner ;-)
>Another three: A html for each package which offers the general
>information, a link to the documentation (if available), a link to the
>debian file of the package in question and a link to get this file,
>and perhaps a link to the copyright which can be provided in several
>ways (plain text or via some cgi-bin thing).
Can you imagine sitting there clicking fifty or so links to download
everything you need? Much easier to ``mget *'', hit return a few
dozen times in succession and go away for a coffee...
But nobody let that stop them ;-)
ttfn/rjk
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