Hi Paul, On Sat, Jul 30, 2011 at 07:36:27PM -0500, Paul Elliott wrote: > I am planing to package the SWISS EPHEMERIS library and its data. > http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=635672 > http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=636089 > > The SWISS EPHEMERIS data is 36 Meg in 54 files. The Swiss Ephemeris library > can be used with out installed data if the user has a private copy of the > data. I would like to encourage data sharing which is the reason for packaging > the Swiss Ephemeris data. Any of the 54 data files could be needed or not > needed depending on what the user is doing. as a start, I'd say 36MB is not big. texlive and xorg are surely more and libreoffice even more so. =) > I believe that for desktop users the cost of managing this is less than the > cost of installing all the data. It costs for people, either administrators or > users to think about things and storage is getting cheap. Yes, installing all by default sounds like a good default to me. > However some day some one may want to put say, a astrology web server on a low > memory device such as home router hardware. These people will want to control > exactly what data they will install. [...] What you want is not a virtual package but rather a meta-package. See xserver-xorg for example (or texlive or libreoffice) which pull in submodules from a central package that holds only central information or even only puts the Depends (like the gnome and gnome-desktop-environment package too). That way you can break apart sensible chunks into separate packages (up to 54) and join them back with the central "give me everything" package (which would be no. 55 at worst). I doubt however that it'll make sense to break apart more than ~10 packages but I'll leave the decision up to you or someone more experienced with the daily usage. -- Best regards, Kilian
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