Re: PKG wishlist

[David Bateman]

John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 31-Aug-2006, David Bateman wrote:
>
> | John W. Eaton wrote:
> | > Is it necessary to have bundles?  Couldn't that be handled by
> | > package dependencies instead?
> | >
> | > jwe
> | >
> | >
> | >
> | >   
> | The goal of bundles is just to simplify the life of the rpm/deb
> | packager.
>
> So that they would just release one large package instead of many
> smaller ones?
>   
This was a possibility.

> It think this is what we want to avoid.  Instead of installing all of
> Octave Forge, I should have the option of installing just the peices I
> want/need.
>
> If we have separate packages only, then people who still want a
> comprehensive could get it with a meta package of dependencies only.
> But if we encourage the packagers to bundle everything together, then
> it seems it will be more difficult to install the separate packages
> independently.
>
> I guess I would eventually like to be able to do something like this
>
>   apt-get install octave
>   apt-get install octave-pkg-audio
>   apt-get install octave-pkg-image
>   apt-get install octave-pkg-optimization
>
> etc. and not also get everything that used to be in Octave Forge.
>   
What we could do in rpm/deb is have individual packages like this, and
have a meta-package that installs all of them in groups. I believe
something similar is done for other systems with packages, though I
don't know the details. Can the deb/rpm packages speak up and state how
they'd like to see things?
> I'm no expert with rpm/deb packages, but it seems to me that in order
> to help them build independent packages, we need to be able to easily
> extract things like dependency information from the Octave packages.
> Then it seems that it would be possible to automatically generate an
> rpm or deb package from the corresponding Octave package.  Isn't this
> what Debian does now with R packages?
>   
That is not a bad idea. Humm I might take a try at implementing that in
RPM and see where I get...

Cheers
David

-- 
David Bateman                                address@hidden
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