Re: just wondering...
"Edward S. Peschko" <esp5@pge.com> writes:
> On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 05:41:14AM +0100, Frank Lichtenheld wrote:
> > On Wed, Feb 18, 2004 at 07:49:18PM -0800, Edward S. Peschko wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > looking through the sources file, and just wondering *ahem* --
> > > exactly how does this work?
> > >
> > > For example -
> > >
> > > imagemagick has a dependency of libpng2-dev.
> > >
> > > However, there is no package entry for libpng2-dev inside sources.
> > >
> > > There is however, a 'Binary' entry of libpng2-dev under the Package heading
> > > of libpng2.
> > >
> > > Is it true that these are synonyms for each other? If so, why? Why not
> > > combine the binary and package entry into one header?
> >
> > The Debian policy has the answers to all your questions:
> > http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/
>
> no, it doesn't.
>
> I surmised that the Binary tag was generated from source packages -
> my question is, why the complexity? Why bother with having multiple synonyms for
> the same package? Why not just have a source package name?
>
> Example: perl generates
>
> perl-doc
> perl-suid
> libcgi-fast-perl
> perl-debug
> libperl5.6
> libperl-dev
> perl-modules
> perl-base
>
> and perl.
>
> I sincerely doubt that any of these 'subpackages' could function separately
> from each other.
The "function seperately" is covered by the Depends and Pre-Depends
fields. Anything not joined by one of them works seperate.
Apart from the other reasons (see other mails) for this split one big
one has been neglegted so far:
Some packages are architecture all and need only be compiled
once. That also means only one copy of the packages is kept on the
debian mirrors instead of 11. The amount of storage space saved that
way is counted in GB. It also saves the traffic needed to mirror the
same data 11 times.
> It also doesn't address the omissions in the apt- system, both physical
> and logical.
>
> Example - why doesn't the sources file and the packages file have short and long
> descriptions of what the projects do? Or a pointer back to the home page of a given
> project, ie: the source where the package was found?
>
> As for physical couldn't find packages for the following:
>...
> fontconfig
>...
Lets just take one example:
% reportbug -f fontconfig
Finding package for fontconfig
Multiple packages match:
1 fontconfig /usr/share/doc/fontconfig/changelog.gz, /usr/share/doc/fontconfig/fontconfig-user.html,
/usr/share/defoma/scripts/fontconfig.defoma, ...
2 libfontconfig1 /usr/share/doc/libfontconfig1/copyright, /usr/share/doc/libfontconfig1/README, /usr/share/doc/libfontconfig1, ...
Select one of these packages:
There are several methods to find the package associated with an
installed file or program. I prefer reportbug. For uninstalled files
and programs the Contents-<arch>.gz files are a good place to look.
MfG
Goswin
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