[csw-maintainers] Question about stub files

[Ben Walton]

Excerpts from jeff's message of Sun Apr 08 00:13:04 -0400 2012:

Hi Jeff,

> Just out of curiosity, what is the rationale behind the
> proliferation of all these *_stub packages?  From the few that I
> have investigated, they mostly seem to contain only a single license
> file.  Why add all this package clutter?  It seems as though they
> can be removed without causing problems.  I'm sure I must be missing
> something.

As Maciej mentioned, they're used only for transitions to provide a
dependency path.

On your system, you would have had CSWfoo/foo.  When foo was updated
to modern standards, it may have become CSWlibfoo1/libfoo1 and
CSWfoo-dev/foo_dev.  To allow for a clean upgrade path,
CSWfoo/foo_stub was created with dependencies on the two new packages.

Other uses of _stub packages are to fix names (CSWfoodev ->
CSWfoo-dev) for standardization or just nicer style now that we have
longer names to work with.

The _stub packages can be safely removed once you've done the upgrade
as the real parts of that package are elsewhere at that point.

Thanks
-Ben
--
Ben Walton
Systems Programmer - CHASS
University of Toronto
C:416.407.5610 | W:416.978.4302