Guidelines for creating subpackages?

[Tony Nelson]

At 12:05 PM +0100 12/2/07, Patrice Dumas wrote:
>On Sun, Dec 02, 2007 at 11:51:27AM +0100, Denis Leroy wrote:
>>
>> I feel the most important thing must remain ease of installation for
>> end-users. If you "yum install foo", you expect foo to be fully working
>> after installation (and how many dependencies it pulls is not necessarily
>> important if you're using yum directly). Remember we don't really have a
>> mechanism in place to say "since you just installed foo, you should really
>> consider installing foo-extras, foo-extensions and foo-plugins as well.
>
>End-users also expect a package install not to drag in packages that are
>not useful. Especially system administrator end-users who care about
>avoiding bloat. Installing everything may be confusing too, not for a
>user who just don't care about what is installed on his computer but for
>a user who want to keep control.

Perhaps if there were a new form of dependency, where a package would be
installed iff all packages that, umm, "co-require" it were installed.  So
then (pulling a bogus example out of my rear) Python bindings for GTK2
would only be installed if both Python and GTK2 were installed, and yum
would install it when installing the last of the co-dependent packages.
This new thing would require much package splitting and tweaking of
co-requires to be useful.

In the case of -devel packages (though I don't personally mind very much
when such a package pulls in other packages), would it be reasonable in
most cases to just not have them require any other packages?  Most of them
are headers, which will be useful during compilation whether or not the
resulting binary can run, but the source that uses them probably already
pulls in whatever of those other packages it actually needs.  I would
think.  (Anyway, co-requires will save me here!)
-- 
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