[m-r-a-m]

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

[bcl]

s/interesting/insane/

[andor]

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".

[m-r-a-m]

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...

[homeomorphic]

Why is this insane? Seriously, what problems does it cause, hypothetical or otherwise?