Re: Section of -dev packages
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
On 17 May 2006, at 10:46 pm, Roberto C. Sanchez wrote:
I found this more instructive:
$ apt-cache search -n .\*-dev\$ | sed 's/ -.*//' | xargs apt-cache
show
| grep \^Section: | sort | uniq -c
1 Section: admin
1 Section: comm
3 Section: contrib/libdevel
256 Section: devel
5 Section: doc
1 Section: electronics
1 Section: games
3 Section: gnome
3 Section: graphics
6 Section: interpreters
3 Section: kde
1379 Section: libdevel
... etc
In other words, on a Sarge system (with backports), over 93% of the
packages (the total is 1757) report themselves as being in devel or
libdevel. On the whole, I would say that is pretty good.
Playing devil's advocate for a moment:
I would have said there is sometimes an argument for a development
package not being in devel, but rather being in the same section as
its 'parent' program; one could think of devel and libdevel as being
for general purpose programming tools and libraries. There could be
examples where the development files are only really relevant in some
extremely specialised context (for example some scientific
application or other) and cluttering up the devel and libdevel
sections with them just adds noise to those sections.
I'm not saying I actually agree with this, but I can see an argument
for it.
A case in point might be libamu4-dev, a package for which I am the
maintainer. This contains development files for libamu4, the core
libraries of the BSD automounter. It is in libdevel, as you'd
expect. I find it hard to believe that anyone actually uses these (I
don't have any practical need for them, and I'm the package
maintainer!) - they're there in case people want to, but I suspect
it's a package needed or wanted by a vanishingly small number of
people, and it certainly doesn't count as a general purpose
programming library. Does it really need to be staring people in the
face in the libdevel section?
Tim
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.3 (Darwin)
iQEVAwUBRGxoBhypeFo2odvPAQIhpgf/XdDs0nRNAKrPOXpGTxSfRtqLsXzIQwPV
bZPfNoeW0JcURqngfmmkb2Kv0ClEovsQ8qjEupzhYx6avX09iTmIKHvXQgZ7bckk
Ve3wOgYZEHMpZOhmXyRe5SKNGXXoZqEZ8Wd4/Nl+twQlkrRXedPPO7NYXKkRgpVY
T75+3PE5wrXgLafAuTGIIYthPiP4iLE8fwXBVP1qhG+jndvWoIbXe5wpQgsO5AmT
6ENlmFt7NULZsOJYlM4sP0YQHZR6lureP7dj0QNvp7dLdii9WBSH3byMsVAQAGbv
j85D8Tf/SIfO4atmq1Eb4tpbPzOucvsuJM4VBFdzLNPWPu/eiNNGpQ==
=FrSj
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Reply to: