Bug#747256: Chocolate Doom should be split into separate packages

Mike Swanson mikeonthecomputer at gmail.com
Sat Oct 25 08:25:00 UTC 2014


I don't agree that split packages is really about file or download
sizes.  The way I see it, a split package would fairly represent desires
to install the games separately as their own entities.

For example, if someone only cared about Hexen, they should be capable
of installing _only_ a chocolate-hexen package, ignoring Doom, Heretic,
and Strife.  This also would free up the desktop menus (or app drawer,
however any particular desktop implements them) from icons for games
that they may never play nor care about.

If file size were really the concern, I could probably place an argument
about *any* package ever being split in the age of terabyte hard disks
and people generally having hundreds of gigabytes free -- even
LibreOffice is "only" ~400MB, why bother installing only Writer to save
a few MB from that?  I just personally don't see split packages as being
a concern about file or download size.  It might be a nice side-benefit,
sometimes, but it's not really about that.

For what it's worth, I maintain the Chocolate Doom package in Arch
Linux's AUR, and since 2.0.0 came out, I have kept it as split packages,
pretty much for the sole reason of allowing people to keep only the
games they care about.  To solve the issue with setup and server
binaries, I made a chocolate-common package that the other four packages
depend on.  You can see the PKGBUILD here:
https://github.com/chungy/aur/blob/master/chocolate-doom/PKGBUILD



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