No, no reason to keep it separate other than that's the way it's handled in Debian so I stuck with the same layout. This might be beneficial if we want to update the package using the Debian one as a base.

I don't see the optification being a problem, as both packages are built from the same source so it's easy enough to make sure everything ends up in the same subdir under /opt

But, if you have a burning desire to move to a single package, I'm also happy with that

It's not possible to remove packages, so you will just have to bump the version to ensure that the newer single/multi-package version is seen as being newer.

is matplotlib optified? i would like to use it (perhaps with PyQt if possible, or PyGTK), but it seems to be rather large. I think it is not optified, but it is also possible that I perhaps do not understand something about how optification works. I see in previous posts there was mention of optification.