Bug#718893: RFS: coinutils/2.9.4-1 [ITA] -- CoinOR base library

[Sune Vuorela <sune@debian.org>]

On Wednesday 07 August 2013 15:45:37 Etienne Millon wrote:
> There are tarballs containing the full distribution at:
> http://www.coin-or.org/download/source/CoinAll/
> 
> It seems to be a a little older (the last release is from january
> 2012), but it would be massively easier to maintain than having N
> source packages. What do you think?

In the general case, it is normally much easier to maintain N smaller packages 
than one giant that combines everything. It makes 'release early, release 
often' much simpler since you can just push a fix to e.g. coinutils without 
having to also push a fix to cgl, cbc and others. Like the bugfix I pushed to 
cbc: http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/coinor-cbc/news/20110701T100215Z.html - 
much simpler just to push that than to push a entire new CoinAll.

And in this specific case, the coinor build systems in general is so full of 
weirdnesses that just adapting it in smaller bits is much more feasable than 
adapting all of it.

And given the different parts of coinor also have different release schedules it 
is also easier to provide the actual newest fixed bits with separate packages 
rather than large combined packages.

So from my experience, both with coinor and with other large source packages, 
(KDE*, Qt*), separate sources is just the thing to do.

/Sune