An Idea whose Time has Been and Gone (Was: Re: How would I get debian unstable?)
On Thursday 05 Jun 2008, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> I think many people don't realize that installing a system is hard. I
> think most computer users would have difficulty installing windows if
> their system hadn't come with it pre installed.
Agreed. I've installed Windows too many times. Modern Linux distros are
easier. You don't need a keygen, for a start :)
> > [Gentoo]
> > didn't seem to offer anything special over Debian apart from the
> > fact of there being no more need for -dev packages.
> If they don't have -dev packages, that means every system is wasting
> space on header files that it probably doesn't need.
Given the price per gigabyte of HDD space nowadays, that's hardly a problem.
I found it highly counterintuitive that when package foo said it needed bar
and libbaz, and I had bar and libbaz installed, it still wouldn't build.
Because what it *really* meant was that it needed bar, libbaz, bar-dev and
libbaz-dev -- the files in the -dev packages would already have been there,
of course, if I had built bar and libbaz from Source.
I know all that *now*, of course. (And you can't have got to where you are
now without knowing it.) I just don't think anybody else should ever have to
go through all the wailing and gnashing of teeth that I had to.
Back in the days when HDD space was expensive and internet connections were
slow and/or metred, there might have been some merit in separating out -dev
packages. But nowadays, they are More Trouble Than They Are Worth. Building
packages from Source is **not** intrinsically hard, but separate -dev
packages make it harder than it needs to be.
Building a "minimised" system is a sufficiently specialised job that anyone
who is trying to do that, probably will have a good idea what files they can
comfortably live without. I think The Rest Of Us generally like the
convenience of automatically-installed packages (whether they be downloaded
as Source and compiled locally, as in Gentoo, or downloaded pre-compiled as
in Debian and Others) whenever possible, but occasionally have some special
need that a package maintainer didn't think of (or need to mix licences and
create an unredistributable package in doing so). And that's when the
whole -dev ugliness comes into play.
Even if -dev wasn't to be done away with altogether, it would be nice at least
to have an option in apt to make it automatically fetch corresponding -dev
packages whenever they existed.
--
AJS
delta echo bravo six four at earthshod dot co dot uk
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