On Sat, Jun 05, 2004 at 04:30:32PM +0200, Eduard Bloch wrote:
> Lars Steinke schrieb am Samstag, den 05. Juni 2004:
> > you are speaking my mind exactly. Anyway, I am not a programmer, so
> > merging the code of wmtemp and wmgtemp is not feasible for me and I
> > don't think a 14k .deb is such a waste of project resources that it is
> > worth the effort (of a code merge or even a lengthy discussion on
> > debian-devel...) - or is it ?
>
> Wrong, it is a waste. You do not only add ONE 14k .deb, you add a 17k
> source plus dsc plus orig plus diff plus 10*14kB (for each arch, and
> maybe more than that), and, last but not least, you make apt and dpkg
> slower for EVERYONE even if many people do not care about some cute toy
> for some weird WM.
Fair enough. Sorry, I am in the process of being taught to simplify
problems to the point of irrelevance ;).
Well, I can follow your line of reasoning. But if you spin that thought
further we would ultimately strive to create a single unified
package "wm-dockapps" containing the roughly 90 dock apps for
WindowMaker packaged individually in Debian, even though probably
no one wants all of them on their system anyway...
And sadly enough, I don't think it's the only class of apps affected by
the problem of explosive package number growth - the numerous small
KDE or Gnome apps come to my mind spontaneously, or xmms plugins.
As you can't realistically expect that all package developers affected
will sort this out between them (they haven't by now), I would
think this problem needs to be addressed in a more general way, perhaps
via Debian Policy (which I find so detailed already that it's unfeasible
to work with without lintian) or by a technical solution (e.g. an
automatic merging of packages with common dependencies based on a
certain ruleset. When thinking about responsibility for bug reports,
a merge would give rise to a lot of complexity that would have to be
handled here...)
> And since the applications are similar and have exactly the same
> Dependencies and Build-Dependencies, they should be merged into one
> package. You don't have to merge the code, just combine the source
> packages.
Is there any documented process for merging source packages, a search on
d.o does not seem to yield anything ? How am I supposed to handle the
different copyrights, ChangeLogs and so on ? Also, I am not the packager
of wmgtemp so it's not only my effort asked for here - two people have
to sacrifice their time for this venture... While I do find the cause of
saving time for all Debian users just and noble, developers usually
don't have it in abundance either.
Just my 2 (Euro)cents,
--
/(__ __|\ Lars Steinke, Stuttgart, Germany
( \/ __)_ Physicist, Steinbeis MBA Student
) (_____ / For information see www.lsweb.de
/___________/ Debian GNU/Linux: www.debian.org
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