[desktop-discuss] [pkg-discuss] Modify pkgbuild to make IPS images

[Joe Di Pol]

Danek Duvall wrote:
> 
>> 3)  All subpackages (-devel, -docs, ...) will have only 1 dependency -
>>     parent package.  This makes a bit strange order of installing
>>     packages, but I want to somehow mark package that is sub-package.
>>     Cause it doesn't make sense to have sdl-devel without main sdl
>>     package...
> 
> The way we'd intended to do these was to dump everything into a single
> package, tag files appropriately, and use filters to install selectively.
> That is,
> 
>     file path=usr/lib/libsdl.so.1
>     file path=usr/lib/libsdl.so devel=true
>     directory path=usr/include/sdl devel=true
>     file path=usr/include/sdl/sdl.h devel=true
>     file path=usr/man/man3/libsdl.3 docs=true
> 
> etc.  Locale-specific packages would be handled similarly, but there you'd
> have a "locale" tag which would specify the locale a particular file
> belonged to.

I wonder if this is a case were technical elegance is getting in the way
of familiarity and usability. Tagging and filtering appear to have some
excellent use cases, but I'm not sure using them to functionally organize
a package is one.

Folks are pretty familiar with the concept of a package name reflecting
what it contains, and being able to use that name to get what they want.
It's hard to see how filtering is better than "pkg install foo-docs"


Joe