Le 27.08.2013 17:07, Conrad Nelson a écrit :
Debian's other problem is this need to split packages. A lot. Debian likes to brag about having a HUGE repository, but when you actually look at it, it's actually an AVERAGE repository made "bigger" by thefact that when you install software, despite the fact it downloads andinstalls up to 12 packages for the same thing it really is basically just ONE package. I don't actually see the purpose in why Debian has to split its packages dozens of ways especially when you still end up having to install them all anyway. Someone explain this to me.
I agree on most of your post, except that part. Can you please provide package's names which should be united?Of course, there are the ".*$", ".*-dev$", ".*-doc$" and ".*-dbg$" packages, which could be merged. For -dev, ok, since text does not take a lot of space. Still, most users does not need the headers of programming libraries, so that separation makes the system smaller, and reduce network load. For -dbg, it' of course a good thing to not merge them: debugging symbols takes a lot of space. Then, there are -doc packages, too. I think the reason is the same: most users does not need them, so why should they install it?
Now, if you mean that packages are too atomic, like, for example, libpython2.7 which depends on libpython2.7-stdlib... I just want to say that it's exactly why I dislike python's softwares: they usually depends on lot of things which I do not think are necessary. Debian simply shows that. I have no other examples than python's ones here, so provide some, so that I could argue better :) (because that argument is really poor: I do not like python... XD )