Dear Ansgar, the problem you are raising is indeed a problem, and as far as I could (which is not much) I have argued towards upstream not to break down code into too many tiny packages. One package, for example, contains a definition for tau (as 2*π) and nothing else. Luckily that dependency was dropped. But it is simply a fact that in the Haskell ecosystem, packages are much more lightweight to create and to maintain than in ours, so we will have to cope with it somehow. You mention about the -dev/-prof/-doc split. This split is way older than my involvement in Haskell in Debian, but there is indeed a good reason: Lots of users of the -dev packages do not need the -prof package. You don’t see that with the build-dependencies (which almost always need the -prof packages of their dependencies to build their own -prof package), but compare: $ sudo schroot -c sid -- apt-get install --no-install-recommends \ xmonad libghc-xmonad-contrib-dev [..] 0 upgraded, 77 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 402 kB/67.5 MB of archives. After this operation, 374 MB of additional disk space will be used. (which is already scary enough) with $ sudo schroot -c sid -- apt-get install --no-install-recommends \ xmonad libghc-xmonad-contrib-dev libghc-xmonad-contrib-prof [..] 0 upgraded, 89 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 47.1 MB/123 MB of archives. After this operation, 745 MB of additional disk space will be used. which certainly does make a big difference. So if you were to argue that Debian suffers _internally_ from the large number of packages I’d argue back that it is still in the interest of our users and therefore it makes sense to leave things as they are. But you argue with the size of the Packages and Translations files, which does hurt users, and even all of them. This is an important point. At least the Translations entries of Haskell packages are highly repetitive, due to the common Haskell blurb in all descriptions, and the triplication of each package description. So it would make sense to check how much the gzip’ed files are smaller if the -prof packages were dropped, as that is the size that is transferred. (On disk the additional bytes do not hurt very much I’d say). Unfortunately I am traveling at the moment and my internet connection is not good enough to make that measurement. I’d also like to hear what others on this mailing list think of the issue. Greetings from Marktoberdorf, Joachim -- Joachim "nomeata" Breitner Debian Developer nomeata@debian.org | ICQ# 74513189 | GPG-Keyid: 4743206C JID: nomeata@joachim-breitner.de | http://people.debian.org/~nomeata
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