Item 14: Packaging Choices

The ultimate goal of a package maintainer is to make it easy for the end user. System-level packages never have this problem because they don't rely on anything that's not part of the core operating system. But higher-level packages often rely on multiple subpackages, some of which are more pervasive than others.

For example, consider the Subversion project. If you download the latest source archive from the Subversion project website, you'll find that it comes in two flavors. The first contains only the Subversion source code, but if you unpack and build this project you'll find that you'll need to download and install the Apache runtime and runtime utility (apr and apr-utils) packages, the zlib-devel package, and the ...

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