Re: "Meta" packages

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Julian Missig <julian linuxpower org> writes:

> Talking with Telsa and Ankh, we came to the conclusion that it would be
> very nice to have meta-packages for gnome 1.4. Smaller libraries could
> be grouped together depending upon how essential they are, and this
> lessens the number of things which need to be installed. I'd simply like
> to bring it up for discussion. Would some kind of script be created to
> help those compiling it all, or what? The basic idea is to optimize the
> packaging and installation so that the downloads a 28.8 user has to make
> aren't too large, and the number of installations a t1 user has to do
> are minimal. I feel this will also help spread the new "essential"
> libraries when the time comes, and it still allows us to only update
> small libraries via helix-update when necessary.
> 

These meta-packages sound like a lot of work, and increase complexity
for maintainers (each time a release is made, the relevant
meta-packages have to get updated).

I think we should reserve such higher-level categorization of packages
for distributions at this time.

 - Maciej