[Pkg-octave-devel] [RFU] octave-interval 1.2.0-1

[Rafael Laboissiere]

* Sébastien Villemot <sebastien at debian.org> [2015-10-07 22:53]:

> Le mercredi 07 octobre 2015 à 22:43 +0200, Sébastien Villemot a écrit :
>
>> - is the separation in two packages really necessary? My 
>> understanding is that separating arch-indep files is only warranted 
>> for big packages, because it saves space on the Debian ftp servers. In 
>> the present case, given that the package is small, I don't think that 
>> the overhead created by a separate -common package is warranted. I 
>> think it just adds complexity for no benefit. Or am I missing 
>> something?

The creation of two packages was done originally by me.

> Note that the Developers' reference seems to agree with me:
>
> https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/ch06.html#bpp-archindepdata

The Developer's Reference does not give numerical values for the minimal 
size of the data in /ush/share that warrant the split of the package. 
However, Lintian adopts precise bonds in its check huge-usr-share:

"The package has a significant amount of architecture-independent data 
(over 4MB, or over 2MB and more than 50% of the package) in /usr/share 
but is an architecture-dependent package.  This is wasteful of mirror 
space and bandwidth since it means distributing multiple copies of this 
data, one for each architecture."

Even though the size of octave-interval-common (550K) is much larger than 
that of octave-interval (63K). this clearly does not meet the requirement 
of Lintian's check huge-usr-share.

Hence, I second Sébastien's suggestion.

Rafael