[Help-smalltalk] Re: Packaging GNU Smalltalk .star archives

[Paolo Bonzini]

> I don't think it makes sense to put every .star archive in its own
> Debian package. At the very least .star archives depending on external
> libraries should go in a separate package, so that packages containing
> those external libraries are pulled only when needed.

Yes, probably.  The others can go in gnu-smalltalk-common.

> That would give something like:
>  * gnu-smalltalk-gtk for GTK.star, BloxGTK.star and gst-gtk.so
>  * gnu-smalltalk-tk for BloxTK.star and blox-tk.so
>  * gnu-smalltalk-ncurses for NCurses.star
>  * gnu-smalltalk-gdbm for GDBM.star and gdbm.so
>  * gnu-smalltalk-postgresql for DBD-PostgreSQL.star
>  * gnu-smalltalk-mysql for DBD-MySQL.star

This one can go in the main distribution because it does not depend on 
libmysqlclient.

>  * gnu-smalltalk-zlib?

> Besides, we'll need to be
> carefull to make sure package.xml dependencies are captured in Debian
> packages[4].

Yes.

> I don't know whether some other .star packages should have their own
> Debian package, e.g. glorp, sunit.

No, I don't think so.  They can just go in gnu-smalltalk-common.

> [1] no problem with multiarch anymore: .star files are searched for 
>     in the smalltalk image dir too

Yes, that's good because you don't have anymore problems with 
gnu-smalltalk-common including a package that is architecture dependent.

Maybe it would it be better to name the packages, for example, 
libgtk2-gnu-smalltalk, libtk8.4-gnu-smalltalk, libncurses5-gnu-smalltalk 
(or maybe even using -gst as a suffix)?  I don't know, I just got it 
from your example of libglib-java.

Paolo