On 3/29/22 08:16, Martin Wilck wrote:
Some applications and libraries may be so special that they simply don't need to be part of the core distro. Every package causes metadata to need to be downloaded and updated, dependencies to be calculated, etc. I'd rather ask the opposite question: why insist on everything going through one big monolith?
As a project we have always been open to everyone's contribution if they believe it maybe useful for other people. Maybe we could go to a "Module" approach where we have a series of repo's but how far do we go with this? we could have some kind of vague "Core" and "Extra" but chances are almost everyone will eventually find something they want in extra so will enable it anyway. You could take it further and maybe split more based on patterns so you have a number of repos ie you could easily make the case that Gnome and KDE could be there own repos because lots of people use one or the other. But in this kind of setup other then minimal servers most users are going to end up with a large number of repos and I suspect from experience that getting zypper to refresh 5-6 repos with much smaller metadata will still be slower then refreshing one repo with all the metadata.
This is an interesting discussion to have every now and then though because maybe we could do things better here.