On Fri, Jan 06, 2012 at 08:20:23PM +0100, Arno Töll wrote:
> The overall benefit over our virtual package system, possibly in
> addition to equivs seems flexible enough. Why do we tailor incomplete
> special case solutions instead of recommending equivs more popularly?
>
> I say incomplete, because similar use cases exist for different package
> groups - e.g. think of mail servers and database servers. Do we really
> want dummy packages for each group of alternatives?
>
> On the other hand, we have a perfect solution which apparently only
> needs some more propaganda if even developer don't know it.
You surely have a point here.
At the same time to use equivs one needs to step out of the package
manager interface, which is the most well known interface to install
Debian packages. And is precisely while you're installing packages that
you get (apparently) stuck on the need of a package called
"apache2-mpm-prefork" or "mysql-server-5.1".
I agree we should advertise equivs more as it is the most flexible
solution. But until it is discoverable from (not to mention integrated
with) package managers, I doubt we can make a dent in the number of
people who will get stuck with this.
All in all, having *some* dummy packages in the archive to fulfill
dependencies in non standard setups would cost us very little and save
quite some time for our power users. It will also have the extra
benefit that we keep a tighter control on the existence of such dummy
packages and on their naming, instead of having tons of equivs generated
packages on user machines with random versioning scheme. This aspect
will make easier actions such as removing those packages in future
Debian releases, when we find a better solution.
Copying -webapps, as this discussion should probably continue there.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} . o .
Maître de conférences ...... http://upsilon.cc/zack ...... . . o
Debian Project Leader ....... @zack on identi.ca ....... o o o
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