On Sat, 17 Jun 2006, Alec Berryman wrote:
Asheesh Laroia on 2006-06-17 15:03:22 -0400:I want to add that there are a lot of these little *2iso programs, and most of them are dead upstream because they are simple, well-tested programs that are complete. Someone on #debian-mentors suggested rewriting them in Perl in one package, but I'd rather avoid that because these tools are well-tested by upstream authors invested in their correctness, plus programs like k3b expect the binaries to take certain arguments.Forget rewriting them, how about just aggregating them into one package?
Well, I considered that, but I didn't think there was an approach that was beneficial.
Here's one way to do it: Talk to the upstream maintainers and get them to collaborate and distribute a huge meta-tarball. But as I've said, upstreams for these consider them "finished", so they'd just as much rather not spend more time. And when one such project updates to fix a bug, someone would
Here's another: I could aggregate them myself. If so, I would end up making that big meta-tarball myself. That would complicate the "watch" file, but more importantly if other distributions want to re-use the packaging work, it's now much harder to see which changes affect which programs. If I choose to actually copy the *.c and *.h files out into a fake upstream tarball I maintain, it makes any patches or changes even more opaque. Also, if one has a bugfix upstream, I'd have to regenerate the meta-tarball that's my fake "orig.tar.gz".
And would this mean generating multiple binary packages or just one? If multiple binaries, I don't see the advantage of aggregating them all into a single source package; if there is a single binary package, then I worry it makes it harder for users to find the specific (and perhaps single) program that they need.
It seems that with all these questions, the easier and more comprehensible approach to me is to simply package each one individually. I welcome others' thoughts on the topic, of course.
-- Asheesh. -- When Marriage is Outlawed, Only Outlaws will have Inlaws.