Re: Bundles in Debian

[Gunnar Wolf <gwolf@gwolf.org>]

Gabor Szabo dijo [Tue, Sep 11, 2007 at 09:59:50AM +0300]:
> on YAPC::EU I mentioned Gunnar that it would be great if we could package
> Bundles in Debian too using the meaning of bundles as on CPAN.
> 
> For those who don't know Bundles on CPAN are special packages that
> only mention a list of other packages in the POD.
> When installing such Bundle using CPAN.pm it reads the pod, extracts the list
> of modules and tries to install all of them.
> These packages have no code in them though they might have some documentation.
> 
> I think it would be useful if we could create and install bundles such as
> Bundle::Test I am currently (not) maintaining, Bundle::CGI::Application
> that does not exist yet and others.
> 
> Bundle::Test would be a good start for anyone who wants to use Perl for testing
> anything.
> Bundle::CGI::Application would include not only CGI::Application but
> many of its plugins. Then web hosting companies (ISPs) could install
> this bundle and provide all the modules needed for good web
> development using the CGI::Application framework.

Hi, Gabor. And excuse me for this incredibly long delay - I do hope to
be back on track. Back on trackish, at least.

I've been thinking a bit on this - On one hand, it'd _very_ easy to
generate Debian virtual packages fulfilling exactly the same role as
CPAN bundles. In any case, I'd like to come up with a proper naming
scheme for this - Bundles should not, IMHO, be called just like
regular CPAN packages, as they are not providing any modules with that
name (i.e., having libbundle-test-perl would be plainly wrong in my
opinion, as users would expect having Bundle/Test.pm in it just for
consistency). We could probably call them without the initial "lib"?
For example, bundle-test-perl.

Just checking quickly, looking for packages mentioning 'bundle' and
'perl' in their name or description:

- libappconfig-perl is not a bundle as you define it.
- libhtml-parser-perl and libhtml-tree-perl (from the Catalyst
  maintainers) are a strange crossing, I think. They _do_ contain some
  modules of their own, but are -out of their description- mainly
  bundles. And, after all, they look just like regular Debian packages
  - I wouldn't advocate changing names or anything for them, as the
  packages in question are not _just_ bundles
- libimage-base-bundle-perl, maintained by Don Armstrong (who is in
  the pkg-perl group as well). Don: The packaging is quite
  starnge... Wouldn't you better consider perhaps splitting it in its
  three constituent packages, and moving the bundle to just a virtual
  package depending on them? Or... Care to explain it a bit?

...And I think that's what we have.

Greetings,

-- 
Gunnar Wolf - gwolf@gwolf.org - (+52-55)5623-0154 / 1451-2244
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