Re: ITP gnome-applets
Christian Marillat wrote:
> I've split this packages in 29 packages one package by applet.
Please reconsider. That's way too many packages for a bunch of little
applets.
Remember, every package you add to Debian wastes space on *all* debian
users' machines for the available file and so on. It wastes *everyone's*
time and bandwidth to download those files. It also makes it that much harder
to use dselect. When you multiply these problems by the number of debian
users, the cumulative disadvantage of adding a package to debian is rather
large. It must be offset by the utility of the package, or you are making
Debian worse, not better. This is something you should consider before
dumping 29 packages into Debian.
Folks, packages are meant to be logical units of files that can easily
be grouped together and managed as a whole. This does *not* mean that
every single file in a package must be usable to every user of a package,
but people keep acting as if it does and splitting packages further
and further[1]. One package per file is where we're going, and when we
get there, the package system will be effectively useless.
Christian, there are several obvious groupings you could choose. Here's
one: pick the best and most popular applets and put them in gnome-applets.
It makes it easy for people to get a good set of applets, and if they
don't use half of them, well they had disk space for gnome in the first
place. :-p Throw the remainder, the weird and exoteric and the not-so-good,
into gnome-applets-other. Come up with some grouping, not this insanity of 1
package per applet. If users later come to you with persuasive arguments
about why a particular applet should be split out, consider splitting it
out then. Not now.
--
see shy jo
[1] Happily, I'm seeing some counterexamples too, like the new
layout for the X 4 packages.
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