On Wed, 2012-02-15 at 16:32:38 -0800, Russ Allbery wrote: > Guillem Jover <guil...@debian.org> writes: > > If packages have to be split anyway to cope with the other cases, then > > the number of new packages which might not be needed otherwise will be > > even smaller than the predicted amount, at which point it makes even > > less sense to support refcnt'ing. > > I don't think the package count is really the interesting metric here, > unless the number of introduced packages is very large (see below about > -dev packages). I'm more concerned with maintainer time and with > dependency complexity, and with the known problems that we introduce > whenever we take tightly-coupled files and separate them into independent > packages.
Well, people have been using the amount of packages as a metric, I've just been trying to counter it. It also in a way represents the amount of work needed. About tightly-coupled files, they can cause serious issues also with refcounting, consider that there's always going to be a point when unpacking one of the new instances will have a completely different vesion than the other already unpacked instance(s). So packages could stop working for a long time if say unpacked libfoo0:i386 1.0 has file-format-0, but new libfoo0:amd64 4.0 has file-format-2, and the file didn't change name (arguably this could be considered an upstream problem, depending on the situation), this would be particularly problematic for pseudo-essential packages. > I just posted separately about version lockstep: I think this is a > feature, not a bug, in our multiarch implementation. I think this is the > direction we *should* go, because it reduces the overall complexity of the > system. [...] I've replied to that separately, in any case I think the best compromise would be to add version lockstep to dpkg, but not refcounting. Because the first is a restriction that can always be lifted if it's confirmed to cause issues (which I think it will), and the second can always be added later because it's something that allows things not permitted previously. But at this point it seems I'm alone in thinking that refcounting has more negative implications than positive ones, and I cannot get myself to care enough any longer to push for this. So some weeks ago I added back both those things to my local repo. regards, guillem -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20120301030201.gb8...@gaara.hadrons.org
