some package splits

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Jan 29, 2008 5:04 AM, Matthias Clasen <mclasen at redhat.com> wrote:
> Last night I built a new evince, and since evince backends are modular
> now, I've split off the dvi and djvu backends as subpackages, evince-dvi
> and evince-djvu. This allows us to avoid the extra dependencies on the
> live cd that those backends would drag in. I've made the new subpackages
> installed by default in comps, but you may have to manually install them
> if you are updating from an older version of evince.

I love it.  I personally have a need for the dvi backend..but I don't
want to force other people to suffer it..especially not targetted
livecd usages.

But I have a general question.  The dvi subpackage is set as default
in comps, so anyone installing evince on an installed system without
it(very rare) will get the subpackages too.

Do we have a facility for livecd users who do an install to harddisk
to gobble up default subpackages for an application that would have
been installed from the network, instead of installing from a livecd?
Would this sort of thing make sense?  I could see an argument for it.
I could imagine positioning this sort of feature like this:

"Due to limitations of CD image sizes, this livecd image is missing
some optional application functionality. We do our best to pack as
much functionality as we can into a CD, but there is so much great
open software that we can't fit it all in.  If you choose to install
to the harddrive, you will get the option to install this missing
optional functionality so that you can enjoy an enhanced application
experience made possible by the larger storage capacity of your
harddrive"


-jef