What to use in packaging

[Bas Wijnen]

On Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 03:10:11PM -0400, Ben Armstrong wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-01-20 at 14:15 +0100, Alexander Schmehl wrote:
> > Allthough most of our packages are independent of each other, there
> > might be packages usefull to group.  e.g. if they have several level
> > set's.  (There ist for example ppracer, the game and some leverls, and
> > tuxracer-extras, which contains many extra levels).
> > 
> > So... uhm... should I add them as ppracer/{...} and
> > tuxracer-extras/{...} or would ppracer/ppracer/{...} and
> > ppracer/tuxracer-extras/{...} would make our job much more easier?
> 
> I'm not convinced this makes our job that much easier.  Are there lots
> of these?  If it's just a matter of grouping a few related packages, and
> those packages have separate sources and separate release cycles, I
> doubt if downloading them all at once is something that would be done
> very often.

Probably it would make our job harder, although just a little, but it would
make it easier for users.  Users will almost always want all packages at once,
because the combination is a complete game.  If there are a lot of
directories, people who found ppracer will also want tuxracer-extra, but they
will likely not see it at all.  People who find tuxracer-extras have a useless
package, unless they also install ppracer.  I think in a case like this
grouping makes a lot of sense.

> So you'd be trading a nice, flat structure

I don't think this flatness is so nice.  I think it's much nicer if every
directory contains a game, irrespective of the number of packages in it.

Of course this becomes a problem for packages which are just support, but they
support more than one game (something like a font, but possibly more
game-specific).  We should probably put them at top level.  Or can we make
symlinks in svn?

> for a
> hierarchical one to gain a small amount of convenience some of the time,

It's only useful for users, and only at checkout.  However, in the long term
most checkouts will be done by users (developers will just update), so I think
this is a good idea.

> at the expense of hiding the actual package name one level deep in the
> hierarchy,

The package name, yes, but not the game name.  People aren't thinking in terms
of packages, they're thinking in terms of games.  An "extra levels" package is
definitely part of the game for which they are meant.  I think it makes sense
to order things by game, not by package.

> and therefore causing some inconvenience the rest of the time.

Personally I think it is only very little inconvenience, while we gain quite
some comfort by it (especially for users, and also a bit for ourselves).

Thanks,
Bas

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