[Gambas-user] Why Gambas is packaged in only one tarball without a configure script?

[Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado]

On 14/07/16 21:44, Benoît Minisini wrote:
> Le 14/07/2016 02:28, Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado a écrit :
>> Hi. In the page http://gambaswiki.org/wiki/howto/package , you give some
>> indications to the packagers. You want one package per component.
>>
>> That's okay but I don't understand why are you bundling every component
>> in one "big" tarball without a configure script. You could create
>> individual tarballs with the configure script generated. That would make
>> quite easy to comply with your wishes.
>>
>> Some packaging tools make pretty hard to split big tarballs in small
>> packages. Specially during the update to a new version.
>>
>> Am I missing something? :)
>>
>
> I don't see what the problem is. Can you elaborate?

Create one big fat package with tens of dependencies from a big tarball 
is quite easy.

On OpenBSD Ports, when the packagers want to split a package in various, 
they use subpackages. The ports use a PLIST file which is a list of 
files to include in the package. When subpackages are used, the 
packagers need to generate the individual PLISTs by hand (almost 100 in 
the gambas case). When the ports are updated to a new version, the 
packager needs to generate again the PLIST by hand.

With small tarballs, the packagers could create individual ports for 
every gambas package. The updates and maintenance would be more simple. 
The configure scripts would help to save build time in this case.