> Problem #2: > > lighttpd presently produces 11 binary packages. That's quite many for an > otherwise small package. Adding binary packages has a metadata cost to > the Debian archive that affects everyone (not just lighttpd users). We > should seek to reduce the package count.
IMHO, it appears that the origin of these issues is the metadata cost, and not that lighttpd is modular. It appears the metadata costs are the tail wagging the dog for package design decisions. That is most unfortunate. > How bad would it be to simply not ship these four packages in buster (as > is presently the case) and add them for bullseye? Which ones do we > really need for buster? Did I miss anything? The previous Debian lighttpd maintainers did a pretty poor job following upstream. Just about everything that you're doing is an improvement, so thank you. Perhaps for Buster, all the new packages should be removed, except those split from existing lighttpd core (mod_openssl) and from mod_auth (mod_authn_file, mod_authn_ldap). Hopefully, Debian will address the metadata cost scaling issue in a future Debian release. I still think it reflects poorly on Debian that lighttpd in Debian will be crippled due to Debian packaging scaling limitations. While I would like to see mod_openssl as its own package for the future, no such requirement exists at the moment, and other parts of lighttpd link against libcrypto (not libssl). The lighttpd build would have to be modified if lighttpd were to provide some algorithms with the core (e.g. SHA1), rather than obtaining them from libcrypto, and then mod_openssl built separately. So for now, let's not do mod_openssl as a separate package. As you proposed, we might proceed with creating lighttpd-modules-mysql and lighttpd-modules-ldap to start the transition, as that makes sense to group the modules depending on the database so that a future Debian release can remove those dependencies from the core. tl;dr: I agree with your proposal for lighttpd-modules-mysql and lighttpd-modules-ldap, though I might suggest lighttpd-modules-mariadb instead of lighttpd-modules-mysql. I agree with your proposal to avoid adding new modules to the lighttpd base package which would increase the dependency footprint of the lighttpd base package. I propose leaving the -dev build dependencies in debian/rules so that others could more easily build dpkgs of the additional modules, and install those modules themselves.
