Re: Stop archive bloat: 47MB gmt-coast-full_19991001-1.deb

[Brian Mays <brian@debian.org>]

>>>>> "Philippe" == Philippe Troin <phil@fifi.org> writes:

    Philippe> I'm just asking for some common sense. This package has 3
    Philippe> different levels of details for the world coastline (low,
    Philippe> high and full). Are they really needed ? Can't just a low
    Philippe> can provided with some pointers to where to get the
    Philippe> additional data ?

Yes!  Why was this packaged in the first place?  Why does this need to
be a package?  I use GMT myself (and have for years), but I would never
DREAM of packaging the coastline data and submitting it to Debian.  That
makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.  This data is already available on
the Internet (and from 3 or 4 different ftp servers, IIRC).  Wouldn't a
better solution be to package a small script that downloads this data
from the network and installs it into an appropriate place in the
filesystem??  Thus, Debian provides automatic access to this data,
without having to actually package the data itself and waste space in
its archive duplicating data that is available elsewhere.

    Philippe> As a matter of facts, I'm kind of opposed to packaging
    Philippe> "pure data" (this encloses bible-kjv,
    Philippe> anarcho-syndicalism.deb, etc) because for "pure data",
    Philippe> packaging is minimal (just dump the file(s) into
    Philippe> /usr/share/doc and that's it). This doesn't apply to some
    Philippe> reasonably sized "pure data" like /usr/share/dict/words
    Philippe> etc...

Exactly.  If the data is available elsewhere on the Internet, IMHO it is
better to package a mechanism for retrieving this data and installing it
into its proper place in the filesystem.

>>>>> "Chris" == Chris Lawrence <quango@watervalley.net> writes:

    Chris> Why not package "pure data" installers, like we do for
    Chris> non-free software (xanim-modules, realplayer, star-office,
    Chris> etc.), and provide the "pure data" on a dedicated "data
    Chris> server" (or data server network)?

I think that this is a good idea.

    Philippe> Does this belong into -project ?

I think so.

Brian