Update Madness?! This is Debian!
12 02 2008I really like Debian. Or (K)Ubuntu which I actually use. And of course apt/dpkg. Great stuff. Almost as good as Portage, with the unbeatable advantage that you don’t have to compile all that stuff on your own 
But can somebody please explain something to me?
Why does a little update in KDE packages always trigger such an update madness?
Like currently in kdepim:
debian/control: Added Conflict/Replaces on ksync for kitchensync. “ksync” gets shipped with kitchensync now. (LP: #133944)
That’s only two packages. Why do I have to update all the stuff coming from PIM? Actually, why do I have to update at all if its only metadata which was changed?
Or in kdebase:
* Stable release update, support new Flash in Konqueror
* Add kubuntu_9917_flash_xembed.diff, adds xembed support to Konqueror
* Add build-dep on libglib2.0-dev
* Closes LP: #184149
Great, flash should work again. But why do I have to download kdebase-data for that?
One of the reasons Gentoo switched to split ebuilds for KDE was the advantage that you didn’t have to download the whole package again just because only one small app like ksync was changed. Why does Portage manage to do that and the good olde dpkg not? Or does that only happen in gutsy-proposed? Can somebody enlighten me?
If you provide a list of the packages that had to be updated, it would be easier for people to follow along from home
But in the latter case, I’d wager that the problem was that kdebase and kdebase-data are both binary packages spawning from the same source package. The source package has changed, a new version number is generated, and all the binary packages that build from it get the new number. To avoid this you would need split source packages, I think.
The list is here. Yes, seems like they are all from the same source package.
But that still doesn’t make any sense at all; why split source packages in the first place if you’ve got to download all stuff coming from it on each update?
Hmmm… ok, it actually makes some sense, you don’t need to install all of KDE at the same time. I think Gentoo had the same problem with split packages in the beginning.
To me as an end user it shouldn’t matter if all that stuff comes from the same source and I shouldn’t really have to update all of kdebase just because a single source file or even only metadata has changed. Guess even good olde dpkg could get some improvements here.