Re: Separating packages.

[Fabian Fagerholm <fabbe@paniq.net>]

On Tue, 2004-04-06 at 08:45, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> This alone is not sufficient reason for producing four packages instead of
> one.  This wastes resources in many places (the Debian package list, the
> dpkg database, etc.).  You must consider whether the benefit is worth the
> cost.

Of course, with the current version of dpkg, your point is very good and
entirely valid.

Thinking ahead, wouldn't it be a good idea to fix dpkg and the package
list to support a larger number of packages? The number of packages in
Debian has been constantly growing, and if I'm not mistaken, a release
of sarge would include somewhere between 10000 and 15000 packages. A
presumptive sarge+1 could very well have much more than 15000 packages.

If sarge is released any time soon, then a few split packages won't be a
big deal. If it isn't, there will certainly be a lot more packages in
testing, perhaps enough to require this change of dpkg and the package
list anyway. So is the cost really that great?

Cheers,
-- 
Fabian Fagerholm <fabbe@paniq.net>