packaging rant

[Petrus de Calguarium]

John Aldrich wrote:

> Now days it's like you have to install a whole
> Office suite just to get a text editor.

In the case of openoffice, you don't have to, but you do have to install core, which 
is now over 100MB. In koffice, also, you don't have to.

As a daily user of this software (KDE/GnuLinux & c.), I don't have any problems with 
the monolithic packages. It makes it much more overseeable to simply install 
kdemultimedia, than to pick and choose, and with the fast pace of development and the 
different names for things, it is hard to keep up with what is called what.

Also, the packages aren't really all that large, so I don't see a lot of point in 
breaking them down into mini-packages of only a couple of MB each. It would cause an 
installation nightmare, unless they were dependent upon each other, so that they 
would automatically get installed together. Only in the case of kdeedu is the package 
very, very large, despite already having had math and kstars amputated.