Re: "Meta" packages

[Ian Peters <itp helixcode com>]

On Tue, Oct 03, 2000 at 01:27:57AM +0500, Julian Missig wrote:
> 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.

This seems much more the task of distributors, not the upstream
authors.  And, as Jacob points out, Debian already does this with
with their task-* packages, which we at Helix use with our Debian
support (task-helix-core, task-helix-gnome, task-helix-gnome-dev).
It's a shame that there's not more support/use of this on RPM/other
based distros.

Regardless, I think this is a problem that should not be tackled on
this level.

-- 
Ian Peters
itp helixcode com