[Pkg-xmpp-devel] Bug#910506: split package into architecture dependent and independent ones

[W. Martin Borgert]

On 2018-10-07 18:05, Boris Pek wrote:
> At first let's look at package size:
> https://packages.debian.org/experimental/prosody
> It is about 282.4 KB. And this is very small size.

It is true, that this is not a huge package. But you need to
multiple by number of architectures (= 21). This is 280 x 21
vs 270 x 1 + 30 x 21, or 5.7 MB vs 0.9 MB.

> Next, let's remember that each separate package increases size of list
> of packages in Debian archive:
> https://cdn-aws.deb.debian.org/debian/dists/unstable/main/
> which will be downloaded by all Debian users even is they do not use
> this package.

This is a general problem in Debian, yes. However, this split
increases the number of packages by only 0.0012 percent.

(Debian must solve the Packages growth problem anyway. We add
new packages every day, which is good. But the global, huge list
becomes a burden. My embedded systems cannot use official
mirrors since 6.0/squeeze because of that. I'm not aware of any
possible solution, unfortunately. I use private mirrors with
only some hundreds of packages.)

> Thus you offer to increase complexity of source package (split on few
> packages with declaration of relationships between them), possibly

It is only some lines in debian/control and an extra install
file of one line, more or less. Added complexity, but very,
very moderate.

> increase work of ftp-masters (think about changing of SOVERSIONs in the
> future, etc.) and increase of size of lists of packages just for
> decreasing size of binary packages to about tens of kilobytes?

I'm not sure, but is SOVERSIONs a problem when no other package
uses the modules? I'm pretty sure, that there is no such
complexity involved, because it is just a one-to-one
relationship between prosody and prosody-libs. There is no
libprosody nor libprosody-dev...

> I would suggest you to reconsider all pros and cons of this decision.

Sorry for already uploading my change. I should have waited for
comments, esp. after asking! I'm absolutely open to revert the
change, if we would agree, that it were a bad idea. It is only
one commit. So far, I still think, the split is a good idea,
but I do not care too much about it. Any comment from the
prosody uploaders?

Cheers