A look at Progeny Debian Beta

A look at Progeny Debian Beta

Even with apt's wonderful dependency system, it is often necessary to install several packages to arrive at one functional program.

I still do not understand how this "componentized" stuff works, and I really don't want to take the time to experiment with it unless I have some minimal understanding of the concept first. How exactly is a component different than a package, or a group of packages with dependencies? If evolution and gnucash both needed some library to work, is that library packaged with both components, or do you need to install the library component? In the former case, it seems likely to cause problems rather than solve them, and in the latter case I don't see how it is different than packages.

The web site seems to explain what the benefits are, but not how they are achieved. When it was first announced amid great fanfare, I got the distinct impression that it was just a marketing breakthrough of calling packages by a new name. I'd like to think that my first impression was wrong and that there is actually something of substance to the concept, and it would help a lot if there was an actual explanation of what it really means.