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Re:Packagers don't know best by m-r-a-m on Friday June 21, 2013 @06:08PM (#5921308)
My favorite interesting packaging choice is TeX Live in Fedora 18 [1]. There are about 4500 texlive-* packages (out of around 35000 binary packages in Fedora total). The packagers split up the packages based on upstream metadata.

[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=949626

Re:Packagers don't know best by bcl on Friday June 21, 2013 @06:57PM (#5921579)
s/interesting/insane/
Re:Packagers don't know best by andor on Friday June 21, 2013 @08:50PM (#5922036)
As a TeX user, I find this extremely useful. The Fedora packages map 1:1 to Texlive packages. There is no need to research if a LaTeX package is available and in which Fedora package it is hidden, you can just install "tex-packagename".
Re:Packagers don't know best by m-r-a-m on Friday June 21, 2013 @07:34PM (#5921728)
It does sound insane to have so many packages, but it also follows Fedora's policy of staying as close to upstream as possible. The entire package building process is automated since TeX Live provides the packaging metadata with the source.

They also include the meta packages [1] so you don't have to install every package individually if disk space is not an issue.

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/TeXLive#Benefit_to_F...

Re:Packagers don't know best by homeomorphic on Saturday June 22, 2013 @05:40AM (#5923072)
Why is this insane? Seriously, what problems does it cause, hypothetical or otherwise?