Modern Update System

[Mike A. Harris]

Nicholas Miell wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-11-28 at 23:40 -0500, Brian Gerst wrote:
> 
> 
>>We don't need to repeat their mistakes.  Most RPMs are small enough that 
>>there is no net gain using this method.
>>
> 
> 
> And from time to time, there's a full 300 MB OpenOffice release for a
> one-line fix to the shell script that launches the whole thing.

If that's a common thing, then perhaps that script should be split
out into it's own src.rpm, perhaps along with some other scripts
or whatnot that are frequently updated.  That was the general idea
behind the "xinitrc" package which we've just obsoleted for FC5.

Perhaps the openoffice project upstream would consider modularizing
their project like X.Org has done for X?  I've no idea, but it's
just a thought.

The way I see it, there are 2 extremes - "too monolithic" and "too
modular".  The trick is getting the right level of granularity to
give a good balance of tradeoffs, both in the upstream project, as
well as at the distribution packaging level.

Then tweaking the modularization granularity over time based on
the results of using it in practice.

300Mb monolithic updates of anything, really really sucks. ;o)