Meta/Hierarchical packaging?

[amos@dsi.co.il (Amos Shapira)]

Hello,

I wander if there is any work being done to make Debian packages
easier to manage and to fine-tune.

What I'm thinking about is something like SGI's "inst" tool.

SGI's tool provides, for each package (e.g. X11) a list of sub-packages
which may be selected from it, things like:

x11.motif.man
x11.motif.lib
x11.motif.extra

And applying an example to the debian environment:

perl5.base.man
perl5.base.bin
perl5.modules.www.man
perl5.modules.www.bin

xntp.server.bin
xntp.server.man
xntp.doc
xntp.client.bin
xntp.client.man

Got the idea?  Any comments about it?

Cheers,

--Amos

--Amos Shapira                    | "Of course Australia was marked for
133 Shlomo Ben-Yosef st.          |  glory, for its people had been chosen
Jerusalem 93 805                  |  by the finest judges in England."
ISRAEL            amoss@dsi.co.il |                     -- Anonymous