splitting up distro packages (was: KDE 4 modules structure (again))

[Maks Orlovich]

> > And please, no nonsense about "saving disk space". Saving a few
> > hundred kilobytes these days is silly. (And people who are short on
> > disk space probably should not trade quite so many MP3s).
>
> 1 Knoppix and related cd's are very concerned with disk space.

These are special cases.

> 2 Debian policy disallows not splitting the packages

<shrug>. 

> 3 A lot of admin's are still very concerned with disk space.

Well, I can't help them.

> 4 There are no downsides, if you provide proper metapackages.

Metapackages only help w/install, not uninstall (well, at least for RPM). 
There is still an increased complexity of packaging, which implies more bugs. 

> It is simply good packaging practice to properly split up the
> packages, and if some distributions don't do it atm, then that is

"simply good packaging practice" --- again, please justify. 

> simply due to the amount of effort it would take.  Look at gnome,
> which is properly split up in every distro I know.

Yeah, and as soon as I temporarily need one Gnome application to test 
something (say a bug report about copy-paste), I have 50-odd packages pulled 
in. Good luck uninstalling those. Frankly, Gnome is a good example of what 
not to do.

And minimizing effort is a good argument, BTW. Effort == complexity == bugs. 
The simpler the better.