[pkg-otr-team] gajim-plugin-otr

[Boris Pek]

Hi everyone,

>>  3. I see you've called the source package gajim-plugins. If the idea
>>     is to potentially maintain a bunch of non-OTR Gajim plugins in the
>>     source package, then I doubt it's appropriate to put it under the
>>     OTR team's umbrella. So, perhaps a dedicated source package would
>>     be better. What do you think?
>
> Probably not, to avoid micro-packaging. To me gajim-plugins is a most
> appropriate form of packaging gajim plugins (and producing per plugin binary
> packages) as long as plugins are shipped from common repository checkout
> even if we're going to ship just one plugin for now.

Producing per plugin binary packages is a bad idea in this case. It increases
the size of Packages.*, Contents-* and Translation-* files in arhive too much,
that affects all Debian users, but not only Gajim users. Also it increases the
size of archive itself because each deb package contains some meta information.

I do not know how many useful Gajim plugins you may want to package, so I will
just show an example of one of my packages.

Currently there are 31 plugins [1] in Psi+ project including OTR plugin. And it
is possible that some new plugins will be added in the future. The size of
psi-plus-plugins package is about 1.5 MB per each architecture [2] and it
appends only 20 strings into Packages.* files [3].

And now try to imagine how it would look otherwise.

[1] https://packages.debian.org/sid/i386/psi-plus-plugins/filelist
[2] https://packages.debian.org/unstable/psi-plus-plugins
[3] http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/dists/sid/main/binary-i386/Packages.xz

> But that's just my vision and I do not mind at all if somebody would choose to
> de-couple this particular plugin and maintain it separately.

Personally I do not think that providing a separate source package is useful,
when OTR plugin comes in a single tarball with other plugins. More over it
increases the amount of work for maintainer, even if only OTR plugin will be
packaged separately and all other plugins will be packaged together.

Best regards,
Boris