[dfc]

Look at this ubuntu erlang package, it depends on 40 other packages, as well. That isn’t even the worst of it, if you type ‘erl’ it tells you to install ‘erlang-base’, which only has a handful of dependencies, none of which are any of these erlang libraries!

That package is a dummy package that depends on erlang-base and the rest of the base erlang platform. You would have to force dpkg to ignore dependencies in order to install erlang without erlang-base. I would love to hear how that happened.

Splitting things up into multiple packages makes distributions easier to manage. One person can take the lead on package-dev while another person can take the lead on package-doc. Splitting things up into multiple smaller packages also makes distributing fixes a lot easier. With a one line fix to one include would you rather send out the entire erlang environment or just the small package that needed the fix?

And yes splitting things up to save storage requirements is most useful for resource constrained devices, not new servers/laptops. But it means that a user who is comfortable with Debian or Fedora on the server/desktop can use their same trusty OS on their next project when the device places serious restrictions on system overhead.

[omaranto]

You misunderstood the point the author made about erlang-base: it's not that he or she somehow installed Erlang without installing erlang-base, but rather that if in an Ubuntu system you try to run 'erl' before installing any Erlang packages at all, you receive a message telling you something like "to get the erl command install the package 'erlang-base'" and if you go and do that, you don't get the Erlang standard library! The point is that Ubuntu should either suggest 'erlang' instead, or not have all those separate tiny packages in the first place.

[YokoZar]

Ahh, this is just a simple bug in the command-not-found package that makes those recommendations when you type in a missing binary, not an underlying problem with the entire philosophy of splitting pacakges!

[omaranto]

I'm not sure it's really a bug with command-not-found: I think in this case it correctly gives the package containing the erl command, namely erlang-base; the problem is that Ubuntu decided that there should exist an erlang-base package that gives you erl without the standard library.

[dfc]

Nice catch. It did not occur to me that people would run a program without installing it, use command-not-found and/ignore the suggests list when installing a package. As another commenter pointed out this has nothing to do with splitting packages up. Its a toss up between user error or bug in c-n-f.