One of the reasons why I think that splitting packages is a much higher overhead than it’s worth, is the version and revision bumping, and in particular, deciding if it has to happen or not. It’s not only limited to patching but also to new version releases, most of the time.
The problem with patching occurs when you have to apply a patch that spans different split packages: if it changes the internal interface between components, you’ve now got to bump the requirements of the internal packages so that they require the new version; if there are circular dependencies in there, you’re definitely messed up. And this also requires you to cut down the patch into multiple parts (and sometimes, apply the same parts at both sides).
The problem with bumping instead is somewhat simpler: when you have a package that is shipped monolithic, but quite separated logically, it’s not rare for upstream to release a new version that only fixes some of the internal “sub-packages”; this is what happens most of the time with alsa-tools and alsa-plugins (the former even more as each tool has its own configure script, instead of a single big one). In this cases, the split packages might not have to be bumped at all, if the main one is bumped. And this is quite a bit of a burden for the (Gentoo) packagers. You cannot just rely on >=${PV} dependencies (as they might not always be satisfied), and you shouldn’t bump it unnecessarily (users don’t like to rebuild the same code over and over again).
In particular, if you end up having the same version bumps for both even if the code hasn’t changed (or you still have to always rebuild them at every revision bump), then you are just making it more complex than it should be: regroup the package in a single ebuild! That is, unless upstream decides to break up the code themselves, like dbus did. If your problem is providing proper dependencies (as it seems it happened with poppler), then your problem is solved by the (now-available) USE dependencies, rather than by splitting to hair-thin packages and increasing the number of “virtual” ebuilds. The same applies to gtk-sharp (and yes, I know both were done by Peter, and yes he knows I don’t like that solution).
Right now, I maintain one split package (by the standard notion of split), and one that comes very near for our purpose: gdbserver and perf. The former is an almost-standalone sub-package of gdb itself (the GNU debugger), which ships with the same tarball, the latter is part of the Linux kernel source tarball (and patches), but is not tied to the rest of the source either.
In the first case, deciding whether to bump or not is quite simple: you extract the gdbserver sources from the old and new tarball, then diff them together. If there is no change, you ignore the bump (which is what I have done with the recent 7.0.1 release). It’s a bit boring but since the gdb sources aren’t excessively huge it’s not too bad.
It’s a different matter for perf: since it’s shipped within the kernel itself, any new release candidate of the kernel is a possible release candidate for perf as well! Luckily I can usually just rely on the release changelog and grep for perf: in front of the git log. It might not be the best choice, as it’s error-prone, but unpacking (and patching, in case of release candidates) the Linux sources that are needed for perf is a non-trivial task by itself, and it takes much more time than it would be worth.
