Small or big dub packages

[Igor]

On Thursday, 1 November 2018 at 14:07:37 UTC, Guillaume Piolat 
wrote:
> On Monday, 29 October 2018 at 11:31:55 UTC, Igor wrote:
>> The way I see it the advantage of smaller packages is that 
>> users can pick and choose and and only have the code they 
>> really need in their project, but the con could become 
>> managing a lot of dependencies. Also I am not sure how compile 
>> time on clean project and previously compiled project would be 
>> affected.
>
> Pros:
>   Users can pick exactly what they need.
>   Encourages decoupling instead of too much cohesion.
>   Less code to build and maintain.
>   Less chances of breakage on upgrade since you depend on less.
>   Improve build time since only modified sub-packages get 
> rebuilt.
>   Good for the ecosystem.
>
> Cons:
>   More link-time operations when not using --combined, each 
> sub-package is compiled at once. Too much sub-package can slow 
> down builds.
>   Possibly hitting more DUB edge cases (less the case since DUB 
> has tests)
>   Directory layout may need to change for proper VisualD 
> support.
>   On the DUB registry, sub-packages are less popular than "big" 
> packages because less discoverable and for some reasons some 
> people won't just pick a sub-package when there is a toplevel 
> package.

Thanks for the list Guillaume.

I don't think subpackages are a good choice for what I have in 
mind. For example there is a number of packages in repository 
that offer image loading and saving to multiple formats, but what 
I am looking for is the most simple PNG reader that just supports 
the most common formats, no indexed or interlaced, but is 
extensible and in case I do get to need those I can just add 
dependency to PngIndexed and PngInterlaced packages and get 
support for those too. After that I might need to also use PNG 
writer which would be a separate package. Subpackage in this 
scenario (and in my mind) would only make sense for some common 
code that these packages would share.

Of course it could be that I don't fully understand 
subpackages... What do you think about above scenario? Are there 
any points you would add or change regarding it specifically?