RE: [PEAR-DEV] a case for subpackages

> From: Greg Beaver [mailto:greg@chiaraquartet.net] > Sent: Monday, August 25, 2003 6:57 AM > I'd like to make a case for subpackages in PEAR. > In practical terms, this means that subpackages must be uninstalled with > the main package, but need not be installed with the main package. > Subpackages by definition cannot exist as standalone packages - they > depend on the main package to exist at all. > Why separate subpackages from the main package? > 1) Subpackages often have a very different stability level from the main > package, and users who only want stable code should not be forced to > read documentation just to determine the stability of a package. > 2) Upgrading a subpackage that has changes is much more efficient in > both time and bandwidth than upgrading the entire package at once. New > subpackages can be released without a new release of the main package > 3) Applications can depend on a minimal set of subpackages, reducing > dependency bloat Ok, I kinda follow your reasoning. However I am just a tad unsure if this is bloat. Seperating some stuff might make sense. For example I might have a subpackage for all the MDB alpha drivers (or maybe even per driver). However I can obviously do that today. The big thing as you pointed out is the uninstall. If I uninstall MDB it should obviously complain about those driver packages as they need MDB. So I should get a list of packages that depend on MDB. I can then run the uninstall command with force install (I don't remember all the existing pear commands) and it should then uninstall all of the MDB driver packages as well. With your modification it would probably do this silently? Dunno if this adds to transparency for the user. I also don't know how these packages should be listed. If we start to encourage this subpackaging the list of installed packages can become very very long indeed (although its growing so fast now anyways that soon people need to search most of the times anyways if they even only have a fraction of pear packages installed). If we don't show them we might only list them when a user specifically wants to get the details on a package (in the list we could have a '*' next to them to show that there are subpackages installed). Anyways I am just thinking aloud. I don't have a final opinion just yet. Regards, Lukas