Stuart Henderson wrote: > Build time of cups isn't really an issue. But the dependency chain > around cups is already very delicate, and anything involving optional > dependencies for a library gets *really* awkward further down the chain.
How about package splitting? cups doesn't require avahi binaries or XML dbus entries (org.freedesktop.Avahi.Something.xml), it can only use libavahi-client and libavahi-common shared libraries, so let them be in avahi-libs or libavahi or whatever. The same applies to dbus packages; they're big and fat with a lot of executables, but many programmes only need libdbus.so. Since we started the topic, another example: as I am typing this in mutt, why would I need the entire cyrus-sasl, if mutt-sasl only needs libsasl? It's already done by various package managers, some of them are ugly, some of them are pretty cool. Most of them split packages into -dev, -doc, -lang, and lib-, of course in case of having files that fit these categories: headers and such - in -dev; man/info pages, pdf/html docs - in -doc; /usr/local/share/locale files - in -lang; shared libs - in lib-. -- caóc
