Where is the modularity?
Thu, 2009-09-03 16:24 — Friedel
Yesterday I saw that there are some updates for my computer. On closer investigation, the issue is summerised thus:
Importance: bugfix
Reason to upgrade:krandrtray from KDE4 is known to have some issues.
A patch was added that makes krandrtray open its configuration module when the system tray icon is clicked.
All nice and dandy. I don't really use KDE any more, but like to take a look every now and then. The "interesting "part is that I have to update 28 packages. Summary:
16KB of additional disk space will be used.
50MB of packages will be retrieved.
Now why on earth 28 packages for a bug in krandrtray?
Comments
I've been saying this for a long time...
I used to be a member of the Gentoo KDE team, and it wasn't easy to deal with the monolithic releases of KDE 3. When KDE 4 started, I tried to make some noise to get that new major release use a more dynamic, split release system, akin to GNOME's, but nothing, they like the monoliths.
I'm not sure what's in their mind, they seem to know little, if at all, about packaging and distributing; or maybe they only know that for what concerns a limited number of distributions. But case in point, likely the 28 packages are the 28 binary packages that are generated from the single kdebase (I guess that's where krandrtray is) source package that has been patched.
Gentoo can sort-of-easily avoid the mess of updating multiple packages, but the whole idea of having a single *huge* source package is, IMHO, absolutely silly. That's one of the major reasons why I moved to GNOME.
You switched to GNOME because
You switched to GNOME because of KDE doing big tarballs? Man people find lots of weird reasons to justify themselves, but this one is really really weird.
I switched to gnome because
I switched to gnome because the KDE developers have no clue on how to deal with distributions, and keep themselves in the "we did it this way, so it has to be right" position. Which is a good enough reason to me, being a distributor.
I have to say you're pretty
I have to say you're pretty stupid to complain about the way sources are packaged. *facepalms*
Kubuntu?
Are you sure they all belong together? Maybe a packager bug. Sounds like Kubuntu.
Re: Kubuntu?
I forgot to mention: I am using Mandriva.
Depends on your distro
¿What's your distro? At least here in Fedora, krandrtray is part of kdebase-workspace, a big package with several dependences (and with other packages depending of it). This is why yum-presto is a must nowaday in Fedora :-).
Other distros (as Kubuntu) have splitted kdebase-workspace (and the other KDE big modules) in multiple packages.
Re: Depends on your distro
I use Mandriva. The 28 updates are these including kdebase4-workspace:
Hell yes
Same thing happens when the splash screen for OOo changes....
We badly need delta updates or at least some smarts for packages that the only change is a version bump (with no code changes at all)
Indeed
It's also annoying that I need to update ttf-opensymbol every time OO.o has a bugfix.
Gnome people are just fully
Gnome people are just fully of freaking whiners
Re: Gnome people are just fully
Yes, I complain, because downloading 50MB of updates actually costs real money in Africa.
This project would probably
This project would probably help if you were using Debian:
http://wiki.debian.org/Projects/ImprovedDpkgShlibdeps
Post new comment