Fedora: RFC: X.Org X11 modularization project - rpm package driver naming

Posted Aug 29, 2005 18:27 UTC (Mon) by jwb (guest, #15467)
Parent article: Fedora: RFC: X.Org X11 modularization project - rpm package driver naming

I understand driver modularization and I wish the Fedora project success. However I hope they don't go crazy and hyper-modularize in the way Ubuntu has. In Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy, important binaries like xset, xmodmap, xrdb and so forth are in their own packages. This really increases the chances that a user will be able to install Ubuntu but not have a working X11 setup. Can you imagine all the mysterious and weird ways that X11 apps and their launcher scripts will break if you don't have xset? The surprise of a long-time X11 user when their .Xresources aren't merged?

Oh, and not to forget the worst part, which is dozens of copies of the DEC copyright statement polluting your /usr/share/doc and package database.

To summarize: modularization good, pathological modularization bad.

Fedora: RFC: X.Org X11 modularization project - rpm package driver naming

Posted Aug 29, 2005 18:53 UTC (Mon) by arcticwolf (guest, #8341) [Link] (5 responses)

Are these things installed by default? If yes, then offering more choice to users who actually *do* know what they're doing is a good thing.

Fedora: RFC: X.Org X11 modularization project - rpm package driver naming

Posted Aug 29, 2005 19:35 UTC (Mon) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] (4 responses)

If that choice is useful, sure. If it's a case of, "well, a user might know what they're doing, and might conceivably think up some wacky reason to not need this but still need that, we don't know, it sounds good though," then the modularization is wasted effort on packaging and maintenance for no good reason.

Choice is all well and dandy, but it isn't always practical, nor is it always useful. It needs to be weighed against its costs in each case.

Besides, even with a monolithic RPM of some large software chunk like X.org, you always have the choice of modifying the package or installing from source. ;-)

Fedora: RFC: X.Org X11 modularization project - rpm package driver naming

Posted Aug 29, 2005 19:52 UTC (Mon) by maney (subscriber, #12630) [Link] (3 responses)

Or, as the article says (and even the excerpt mentions this, albeit specifically about drivers), it allows a finer grained update when required to fix serious bugs or security issues. Now a buffer overflow in one program needn't cause everyone to fetch 50MB of mostly-unchanged binaries - that's worth quite a bit, actually.

Fedora: RFC: X.Org X11 modularization project - rpm package driver naming

Posted Aug 29, 2005 21:16 UTC (Mon) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (1 responses)

On Debian Sarge the size of the deb xbase-clients is 2MB, and the instlled package size is 5MB .

Compare that to libc6 and to coreutils (that were actually merged from three packages to 1 a couple of years ago). Each of the two is larger.

Fedora: RFC: X.Org X11 modularization project - rpm package driver naming

Posted Sep 1, 2005 14:44 UTC (Thu) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link]

You missed the dependencies issue. E.g., out of the entire xbase-clients package I need only xauth for the ssh X forwarding. But some other executables from this package are linked against Mesa, so I have to install it too (another 11 MB). Instead of mere 32kb of a single exec, I end up with 16MB and a few dozens of absolutely unused files - which need to be periodically updated, backed up, checked for intrusion violations, etc. So modularization is a good thing. Of course, a dummy meta package can be defined (under the old name) that depends on all the individual components to make life easy for inexperienced users.

Fedora: RFC: X.Org X11 modularization project - rpm package driver naming

Posted Aug 30, 2005 7:59 UTC (Tue) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]

If you have to download a whole 50MB package to fix a security issue in just one 20kb binary, then your package system is flawed and should be fixed, and not the packages ajusted to this broken system.

In case of Fedora the package system would be rpm. And as I see on my SuSE system, rpm can handle patch rpms and binary deltas, so even after a complete reinstall of SuSE 9.3 (which is soon half a year old) I still do not have to download more than 10MB of security updates, including kernel and kernel source.

This is the way and not uselessly modularizing every big package and thus slowing the system down with huge package databases.

Fedora: RFC: X.Org X11 modularization project - rpm package driver naming

Posted Aug 30, 2005 2:02 UTC (Tue) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]

This is how it has been done upstream -- see http://cvs.freedesktop.org/xorg/app/. In the end, we felt that keeping closer to upstream was more important than grouping huge hunks of source packages into large binary packages. I don't think that any of those will realistically change much at all anyway, so the only problem you have is the huge gobs of MIT boilerplates taking up your diskspace, at which point you have bigger problems anyway.