Packaging Standards

[Maynard Kuona]

I think one other thing Fedora could try to do is come up with a
packaging standard that they could encourage other rpm distributors
(third party) to follow.

For example, Gstreamer involves a lot of plugins for multimedia, and you
will find out that many people try to put these plugins in huge single
packages, and others prefer to distribute them singly. I think a case
could be made for each approach, but sometimes this can cause problems.

A suggestion in this case would be to encourage people to distribute the
packages singly, but if someone is interested in distributing them
together, they could create a container package which depends on all the
plugin packages to be installed. So instead of gstreamer-plugins being
one huge file, it could be a small file which apt uses to pull in
dependencies. This way, when someone releases a new plugin, one doesn't
have to repackage the whole thing, just offer the new plugin in its
place, and it is much easier to keep this up to date IMO of course.

Any comments.