On Mon, Jan 04, 1999 at 08:29:45AM -0500, Michael Stone wrote: > Quoting Hamish Moffatt (hamish@debian.org): > > At the same time, is it a bit odd that we ship everything we package > > all together? We wouldn't expect a commercial OS vendor to ship every > > available piece of software with the OS. > > > > Having everything packaged is terrific, it sometimes just seems a bit weird > > that we include everything with no separation of the core OS. We do have separation of the core OS, in the form of the "priorities" system (and the "base" section, and essential tags). It just doesn't work very well for two reasons:- 1. We don't separate it on the ftp sites, only conceptually 2. dselect always shows all the packages, although it can order them differently. I think what we need is something slightly more sophisticated, separating types of software (in a different way to the "sections"). We should have some kind of classifications of packages as "apps", "utilities"/ "applets", "drivers", or "core OS". We also NEED to do this for the offline/European user; I know the website does it very nicely. Part of the problem is simply that there is *so much* in Debian. I don't have time to read through the Packages list completely (2.5MB of pure ASCII), but more importantly, I don't have time to try every package that sounds interesting and decide whether to keep it, and then remember what it did, and whether I wanted it. What this does is to give me the impression that Debian is badly organized, which it isn't really. But a separation of a lot of the packages we have into easier-to-manage chunks would be nicer. A good example is the huge package-clusters (like python, grep -c "Package: python" /var/lib/dpkg/ available gives me 44 packages!). Another good example is the size of the "devel" section. It's too big, IMHO it should be split ASAP. Maybe we should have Policy (or whatever appropriate document which applies to the distribution organization as a whole) say if there are more than (say) 20 packages in a section, it should be discussed and voted on as to whether it should be split at least every 3 months. -- Tom Lees <tom@lpsg.demon.co.uk> <tom@debian.org> http://www.lpsg.demon.co.uk/ PGP Key: finger tom@master.debian.org, http://www.lpsg.demon.co.uk/pgpkeys.asc.
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