metapackages

[Reinhard Tartler]

On 9/26/05, Carey O'Shea <carey at internode.on.net> wrote:
> Reinhard Tartler wrote:
> >May I ask you which multimedia related packages, besides w32codecs,
> >you are missing in breezy?
> gstreamer-mad, w32codecs, flash, libdvd*, gstreamer-faad, etc... all
> those non-free multimedia things that people install from
> universe/multiverse. If these were covered by a ubuntu-multimedia-gnome
> metapackage, then it would be much easier for the user, right? My
> understanding on this is not complete however.

So, lets see. w32codecs and libdvdcss cannot be shipped because of
legal issues. So there is no point in including them in a
meta-package. There is no package named flash, I assume you refer to
flashplugin-nonfree or flashplayer-mozilla. In that list, you'll
probably also want j2re1.4-mozilla-plugin.

Let's summarize this proposal:
Package: multiverse-multimedia-extras:
Depends: flashplayer-mozilla,  j2re1.4-mozilla-plugin,
gstreamer0.8-mad, gstreamer0.8-faad

This makes 4 packages for the metapackage. I doubt that it is worth
the efford of creating and uploading it, seriously. (Besides, think
also about not x86 archs, we also want to support amd64 and ppc
users!)

I've also taken a glance at Seveas ubuntu-devel proposal. First, my
objection is, that  there is a lot of redundant dependencies. If you
take off all these redundant, I also don't really see the point of
creating it. If I want to prepare the installation for development of
C++ application, I would install `build-essential`, which takes most
tools I need for casual development. If I need a specific library, I
have to install the correct -dev package myself, no point in doing
that in a generic metapackage.

The same goes to packaging. If I intend to do packaging related work,
I install the devscripts package, which itself depends and recommends
a lot of usefull packages. For serious packaging work, I have to
satisfy build dependencies of the package again manually. So still no
point in the meta package.

The same also goes to the other packages. Again, I don't want to bash
your and Seveas proposals, in general, I like the idea of having
convenient meta packages. But with the current proposal, I don't see
much profit.


--
regards,
    Reinhard