Re: Proposal: Prefix language-name for language library packages

[Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name>]

On Fri, Apr 29, 2016 at 06:31:24PM +0000, alírio eyng wrote:
> Ludovic Courtès:
> >what about multiple-language packages?  I’m thinking of
> >‘c+guile-guile’ and ‘c+siod+python-gimp’.
> the ideal categorization would be one output for each interface.
> so "guile" (scheme), "guile:c", "gimp" (gui), "gimp:c", "gimp:siod",
> "gimp:python", "emacs" (gui), "emacs:tui", "emacs:elisp" (to run
> "emacs -batch -eval").
> e.g. guile:c and emacs:tui are pretty useless for me, so i could not
> install them.
> it's worth to focus on packages already split: "emacs" (gui+tui+elisp)
> and "emacs:no-gui" (tui+elisp), linux-libre, ...

I don't think we should split packages up unless there is a pressing
reason to do it. For example, some our packages have a rarely-used
component that uses a lot of disk space or has a very large dependency.
It makes sense to put those in different outputs.

But if we go too far, nobody will be able to tell which package to
install to accomplish their task.

> c nomenclature:
> packages with c interface currently have nothing, "lib" (prefix or
> postfix), "c-", "-c", "4c" or "-headers".
> e.g. "readline" "libunistring" "htslib" "c-ares" "json-c" "icu4c"
> "mesa-headers" "linux-libre-headers".
> and lots of synopses with nothing, "C library for", "C library
> providing", "C library to", "implementation in C" or "written in C".

Again, unless some package's headers take up a large amount of disk
space, or have some other onerous cost, I don't see a reason to put them
in a separate output.