more debian (and other) packaging of plugins?

[Jelmer Vernooij]

Am Donnerstag, den 12.06.2008, 23:05 +0200 schrieb Reinhard Tartler:
> John Arbash Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> writes:
> > Reinhard Tartler wrote:
> > | "Martin Pool" <mbp at sourcefrog.net> writes:
> > If they were packaged individually, with a meta-package that installed them all,
> > would you need to upload all of them each time? It seems like the meta can just
> > depend on either *any* version or version >= XXX, which will be satisfied with a
> > newer version.
> Martins intention was to get the plugins updated more quickly. Since
> maintaining plugins in individual packages increase maintenance labor I
> don't think your proposal would help here.
I don't think the overhead is that big. Most plugins don't change very
often so would only need an upload every couple of months. E.g.
bzr-email has only been uploaded once in the last two years. Uploading
a new version is simply a matter of changing the version in the
changelog and building with bzr builddeb (yay builddeb :-).

A big plugin package has some problems:

The dependencies of plugins in a bigger package could be annoying (you'd have to install the 
dependencies for all plugins, even if you don't use all of them). 

It's not possible to deinstall only one plugin if it's breaking things
for you (e.g. bzr-dbus broke for some people recently) without deinstalling all of the other plugins as well.

The source package has to be manually crafted (no builddeb magic available).

> > | How about granting more developers access to the bzr PPA? I think at
> > | least the pkg-bazaar packaging group on alioth should have, but I don't
> > | see any particular reason to not also allow all motus to upload there.
> > |
> > | Moreover I'd like to see the packaging branches for the pkg-bazaar group
> > | packages shared with the PPA packages. They are currently hosted on
> > | bzr.debian.org, and I could imagine that we can mirror them on launchpad.
> > |
> >
> > Everyone who is on the '~bzr' team has access to the PPA, I wouldn't really want
> > to open it up more than that (and we have certainly discussed restricting it more).
> Could you please elaborate on that? You obviously trust members of
> pkg-bazaar to properly maintain bazaar related packages in debian (and
> therefore ubuntu) but not in the PPA?
At least for me personally, the reasons for not uploading to PPA are
that it's a timely process (since packages have to be uploaded for 3
different Ubuntu distributions and Debian bug 473450) and Launchpad bug
215661.

Cheers,

Jelmer

-- 
Jelmer Vernooij <jelmer at samba.org> - http://samba.org/~jelmer/
Jabber: jelmer at jabber.fsfe.org