[Fedora-packaging] one big SRPM for lots of different stardict dictionaries?

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Hi,

I stumbled over the CVS branch creation commit mails for a package
called "stardict-dic" in my inbox and thought "hey, nice, someone
packaged dictionaries for startdict". But then I took a closer look at
the package and the review bug
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=231267
and got a bit worried.

The plan of the packager afaics seems to be to get all the current and
future dictionaries for other languages into this one just-reviewed and
approved package stardict-dic (SRPM currently 84 MByte in size afaics),
from with multiple sub-packages get build (currently:
stardict-dic-{en,ja,ru,zh_CN,zh_TW} ).

The "one SRPM for all dicts" approach IMHO has major disadvantages IMHO:
the SRPM will become really big if dictionaries for other languages
become part of it. This might be acceptable, but for each added dict or
each bug that gets fixed in one of the dictionaries the whole SRPM gets
rebuild and thus all the stardict-dic-{en,ja,ru,zh_CN,zh_TW} packages
get created newly as well, which creates a lot of load for mirrors and
users to download and install (¹).

This sems very wrong to me; or am I overacting here?

I'd say we should work towards a scheme similar to hunspell; e.g. one
source package per language. Other opinions?

CU
thl


(¹) -- Example:

- user foo install stardict-dic-en-2.4.2-2.fc7.noarch.rpm
- maintainer add german dictionary to stardict-dic, increases release by
one and rebuilds
- user foo updates to stardict-dic-en-2.4.2-3.fc7.noarch.rpm
- maintainer add spanisch dictionary to stardict-dic, increases release
by one and rebuilds
- user foo updates to stardict-dic-en-2.4.2-4.fc7.noarch.rpm
- and so on