Guidelines for creating subpackages?

[Patrice Dumas]

On Sun, Dec 02, 2007 at 06:15:24PM -0500, Tony Nelson wrote:
> 
> 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.

That adds a lot of complexity and 'magic' in the system, in my opinion, 
for few gains. Not a bad idea, but, still in my opinion th eincreased
complexity is not worth the trouble.

> 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!)

No, development packages needs to allow for linking, too, and the .so links 
are in the devel packages. So they need to pull in all the dependent
libraries (and it is the issue in case of vtk, since there is a
python-linked library and a qt-linked library pulled in).

And in case headers include other headers, the devel packages are to be
installed too.

--
Pat