Re: [gentoo-dev] 1/2 OT: splitting packages

[Joshua Jackson <tsunam@gentoo.org>]

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Daniel Ostrow wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-05-14 at 23:18 +0200, Enrico Weigelt wrote:
>   
>> Hi folks,
>>
>>
>> I know this issue is not actually in the scope of this list, but
>> maybe some of you might be interested:
>>
>> Lots of packages have optional parts which (IMHO) should/could be 
>> their own packages, ie. GUI frontends to console tools (aumix) or 
>> several language bindings of certain libs/toolkits. 
>>
>> Those things tend to produce circular dependencies, which can
>> only be solved with tricks like multiple builds, special useflags
>> like "build" or "bootstrap". 
>>
>> For example berkeley db: it written in C and has additional 
>> bindings for C++ and Java. This produces two kind of problems:
>>
>> a) for the base system we must take care that it's built w/o them. 
>> b) if some package needs an special binding, dependencies get tricky
>>    (AFAIK portage cannot solve feature deps yet)
>>
>> An clean solution would be having the bindings as separate packages.
>> Of course, often the upstream is not ready for this yet, and it's
>> not in the scope of an distro like gentoo to such heavy changes.
>>
>> But those splits really should be done (IMHO) to make things a lot 
>> easier. So let's do it - do the split and try to convince the 
>> upstream to get it in.
>>     
>
> We release our packages as upstream intends. If they don't split them,
> we don't split them, talk to upstream not us. This is what use flags are
> for...
>
> --Dan
>   
At what point is your sand so fine that you can't identify it as a
grain. In other words...this induces a much larger set of packages that
at least in my opinion would waste a lot of developer time for not a lot
or any benefit, and as mentioned by Daniel we follow upstream and if
they want it as one large package, we'll do it as well.


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