Re: Guidelines for creating subpackages?

[Warren Togami <wtogami redhat com>]

Joachim Frieben wrote:
> > When/if it makes sense, and doesn't create an unduly increased
> > maintainance
> > burden, sure. 
>
> I understand, but why then have been built vtk, vtk-python, vtk-qt,
> and vtk-tcl packages but only a combined vtk-devel package which
> depends on the former ones?

This might be a parallel to pidgin-perl or libpurple-tcl, but there is 
only one pidgin-devel package.  The reason perl or tcl was split out 
into sub-packages is because the vast majority of users don't need the 
perl or tcl capability, but including them in the main package caused 
all users to pull in tcl and perl when they were not necessary.

-devel on the other hand is not meant to be installed except by 
developers.  It might pull a large number of things, also needed only by 
developers.  This is not inconsistent.

Warren