Fwd: Trilinos: to split or not to split?

[Graham Inggs <graham@nerve.org.za>]

Hi All

Nico and Felix are seeking guidance on whether to split the Trilinos
binary packages so that each installs a single shared library or
whether to lump them all together, as was done in the previous
packaging (trilinos 10.4.0.dfsg-1, RM'd 2012-05-15).  Policy advises
"When in doubt, always split shared library packages so that each
binary package installs a single shared library" [1].  Their current
packaging [2] is split into 90+ pacakges.

Please keep Nico and Felix CC'd as I don't believe they are subscribed
to this list.

Regards
Graham

[1] 
https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-sharedlibs.html#s-sharedlibs-runtime
[2] 
http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debian-science/packages/trilinos.git/tree/debian/control


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Nico Schlömer <nico.schloemer@gmail.com>
Date: 24 September 2015 at 11:17
Subject: Trilinos: to split or not to split?
To: ftpmaster@debian.org
Cc: Debian Science List <debian-science@lists.debian.org>, Graham
Inggs <ginggs@debian.org>, Felix Salfelder <felix@salfelder.org>


Hi everyone,

Graham, Felix, and I are just looking into packaging Trilinos [1] for
Debian (again [2]). The structure of Trilinos similar to boost in that
it consists of a few dozen "packages".
We're now trying to figure out if it's best to ship all of Trilinos in
one target (e.g., libtrilinos{-dev}) or to split it up along the
packages (libtrilinos-{belos,amesos,ml,...}{-dev}). In the current
version [3], we're doing the latter.

Some numbers:
```
$ ls libtrilinos-*12.2.1*.deb | wc -l
90
$ du -s libtrilinos-*12.2.1*.deb | cut -f1 -d' ' | sort -h | tail -n 10
912
924
1064
1096
1376
1568
1944
2644
2960
7596
$ for i in libtrilinos-*12.2.1*.deb; do dpkg -I $i | grep Installed-Size | \
  cut -d' ' -f3 ; done | sort -h | tail -n 10
4865
4913
5005
7171
7566
10682
12912
19051
20403
47295 # <= I guess, this means 47MB
```
Is there a Debian policy on this? What's your opinion?

Cheers,
Nico

[1] https://trilinos.org/
[2] https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/trilinos
[3] alioth:/git/debian-science/packages/trilinos.git