 you raise some very good points
There are tradeoffs to fat packaging vs thin. Here is some of our
thinking that landed us in fat packages:
Ease of install was big driver. We modify cyrus saslauthd. In
the future, maintainers of SASL obliging, this change will be
pushed upstream. In the meantime, imagine if installing zimbra
required you to remove your cyrus-sasl. Don't know about you, but
rpm --test -e cyrus-sasl
makes me a little nervous at this stage.
You should think of the mysql instance inside the Zimbra mailbox
store as an embedded database.
At this time, we have a LOT of people trying to install ZCS, and
kick the tires. Many of them would like that any trial install of
Zimbra not screw up their distro installation - everything being
in /opt/zimbra adds some insurance and level of comfort. Going
forward, for every new release with a lot of features that people
want to quickly install and try, they should feel comfortable that it is
not going to do "atrocious" things to their /etc directory. [One
person's atrocious is another persons normal. Such is life.]
Large and/or mission critical Zimbra installations will expect to
run on versions we have tested - and we'd like to minimize the
variation across distros - to ease our lives.
We fully intend to track 3rd party package versions and stay
current - managing risk through our QA processes.
All that having been said, in the future, would we like to see thin
packages? Absolutely! Like I said in the debian port thread - we
fully expect that someone else will beat us to it.
Should we have done thin packages to begin with? I am not so
sure.
On a related note, we are also working on cutting the download sizes
in cases where you want just the ZCS sources, or if we haven't rolled
mysql version then you shouldn't have to downloaded it again to go the
the next dot release or milestone build of ZCS.  |