> On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 11:17:47PM +0100, Søren Hauberg wrote:
> > ons, 22 12 2010 kl. 23:05 +0100, skrev Thomas Weber:
> > > Having quite some experience with maintaining the splitted
> > > packages in
> > > Debian I can assure you that maintaining the small packages in a
> > > distribution is at least *an order of magnitude* more work than
> > > the
> > > monolithic build ever was.
> >
> > Is there anything that can be changed in Octave-Forge that would
> > simplify this work?
>
> No, not really. Packages have a sort of fixed overhead that just needs
> to be done.
For Fedora at least, the largest part of the fixed overhead is the initial
one: getting through package review. There's a surplus of packages to
review and a deficit of reviewers. Unfortunately the way the review system
currently works is that each package will be treated as an isolated package,
there's currently no mechanism to "batch review" a lot of very similar
packages. If they are considered separate packages by the buildsystem,
i.e. separate tarballs, they have to be reviewed one by one. That's why
having a semi-monolithic build of octave-forge would still be useful, perhaps
grouped into 4 or 5 different groups, e.g. the way gstreamer has their
plugins grouped into "good", "bad" and "ugly":
http://www.gstreamer.net/
There is, of course, an ongoing fixed cost to maintaining each individual
package separately, but that cost is much smaller in comparison to the cost
of getting through the initial review, IMHO.
Alex
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