On Fri, 2006-03-24 at 18:20 -0300, Nelson A. de Oliveira wrote: > I still don't see good reasons to merge the 4 programs :-/ It's of course always a tradeoff between the extra work of merging things and the possible benefits. I can see two major benefits: If you can convince upstream to join forces and integrate the work into one tool, this is an improvement for the quality of the code. In my opinion this is the best way to go: there's only one copy of the infrastructure (reading files, user interaction, error handling and recovery...) with more eyes on it, and only the algorithms differ. This should improve the quality of the general program. Another major benefit is for the user: they want a program to 'crush' pngs. Speaking for myself, when I was looking for a program to do that task, I wouln't want to install four different Debian packages and evaluate them. Each of the programs would probably have different options and a different modus operandi. I would want to install just one package with either four programs I can try, or better, one program that has a switch for the algorithm to use. It has the additional benefit of having one Debian package to maintain. I can't imagine that the size overhead would be that big to be significant. If you can convince upstream to go along, you would satisfy both benefits, but if you don't, I still think the second benefit is worthwhile enough to implement it. Thijs
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