An Early Look at Progeny Debian 2.0 [LWN.net]

An Early Look at Progeny Debian 2.0

Posted Apr 15, 2004 10:36 UTC (Thu) by fergal (subscriber, #602)
Parent article: An Early Look at Progeny Debian 2.0

Is it correct to compare a component with Bundle on Perl's CPAN? A bundle is an abstract package. It contains no code, it just lists some dependencies. So when I ask the cpan tool to install a particular bundle, it goes and installs all the dependencies and then it's finished because the bundle itself has no installable files.

If that's not how Debian's components work, then maybe it would be worth considering as a nice way of doing things. It would also allow installing, removing and upgrading of components with a single command.

(Log in to post comments)

CPAN Bundles

Posted Apr 16, 2004 19:33 UTC (Fri) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

No, in reality the CPAN bundles have their counterpart in "virtual packages". Virtual packages are packages that have no content, only dependencies.
The "components" are groups of packages that *preferently* have few dependencies outside their group. This has the advantage of granularizing the releases, as in "we can release only the GNOME component, without waiting for the release of the KDE component".