Re: RFS: qastools

[Benoît Knecht <benoit.knecht@fsfe.org>]

Sebastian H. wrote:
> > Why regroup qasmixer and qasconfig into one package? Wouldn't it be
> > better having them Recommend each other? It doesn't seem like an
> > improvement forcing users to install both tools instead of giving them
> > the choice. But maybe I'm missing something.
> 
> The short answer is, it makes package maintenance much easier and
> is less error prone.

I see the point of having one source package for all the tools, but you
could still make several binary packages from there (as alsa-tools does,
though not for every single utility I must admit).

> A somewhat longer explanation includes:
> 
> 1. All QasTools share certain amounts of code. But it's not worth it
>    creating a library package (with all the hassles) for that.
> 
> 2. All QasTools share a single localization database (app_xy.qm).
>    It's a pain to organize translations for a small application.
>    A single translation file for a small number of applications is
>    much easier to deal with for translators and maintainers.
> 
> 3. QasTools may grow by a few applications. It's very likely that
>    potential users will install/use more than one of them anyway.
>    The applications themselves are not very large.
> 
> 4. This goes in the tradition of alsa-tools, alsa-tools-gui and
>    alsa-utils. They all bring a small number of applications wich
>    cover certain aspects of ALSA.
> 
> I hope this makes it a bit more clear.

Those seem like perfectly valid reasons, and it does make it clearer,
thanks. Might be worth including the gist of it in the debian/changelog,
so that users who wonder about the change can find the reason easily.

Cheers,

-- 
Benoît Knecht