On 11/09/2007, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler(a)chello.at> wrote:
Michel Salim <michel.sylvan <at> gmail.com> writes:
Both monolithic and modular packaging has advantages and disadvantages. The
advantages of the monolithic way:
* less packages => less packaging work
* clearer versioning: You know that you're using KDE 3.5.7, whereas for e.g.
GNOME, you have stuff versioned 2.18.0, 2.18.1, 2.18.2, ... and it's hard to
figure out what GNOME version this actually corresponds to (and similarly for
the new modular X.Org X11).
Oh yes. Figuring out which parts of X.org 7.3 is in F8 and which is
not, is not exactly trivial.
But of course, the advantages of the modular way (independent
updates, better
granularity for end-users) have been beaten to death on this list already. The
granularity could be obtained in other ways though (e.g. subpackages).
Subpackages give end-users better granularity, but still does not
allow for independent updates (unless, taking Umbrello as an example,
an urgent Umbrello release is handled by building a separate package
that is versioned higher than the bundled kdesdk-umbrello). Gets
unwieldy really fast!
(Alternatively, kdesdk maintainer needs to pull the fix pertaining to
Umbrello, apply it as a patch, release it and prepare for the grumbles
from other kdesdk users who then have to upgrade)
Still, my current position (and as far as I was able to tell from the
general
feeling when this issue came up in the IRC meetings, also the one of the KDE
SIG, feel free to correct me if I'm misrepresenting anyone's opinion here) is
that unleashing even a subpackage for every single KDE app would lead to a
gigantic mess which would cause more problems than it solves.
Seems reasonable.
Regards,
--
Michel