Re: An Idea whose Time has Been and Gone (Was: Re: How would I get debian unstable?)
On Thu, Jun 05, 2008 at 07:44:48PM +0100, A J Stiles wrote:
> Agreed. I've installed Windows too many times. Modern Linux distros are
> easier. You don't need a keygen, for a start :)
>
> 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.
Many people live in areas where dialup is still the only available
connection type.
Some systems don't have lots of disk space (I work on a router that has
256MB flash, so wasting space on headers files is not an option).
> 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.
Why should it be a specialized job, when keeping it split makes sense
in the first place? There are also conflicts that are avoided by
keeping the headers seperate, such as different providers of the same
header files from different implementations of the same type of library
(multiple openGL implementations, readline, etc).
> 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.
apt-get build-dep packagename
What more do you need? If you are building something from source, you
should already know enough about what you are doing to figure that part
out.
--
Len Sorensen
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