Steve Greenland <steveg@moregruel.net> writes: > On 22-Apr-07, 14:39 (CDT), Neil Williams <codehelp@debian.org> wrote: >> >> I'd like to see all library source packages having a minimum of 4 >> binary packages required by Policy: the SONAME, the -dev, the -dbg and >> a -doc package. (Libraries for perl or other non-compiled languages >> would be exempt from -dbg packages but not -doc.) > > 1. Rather than cluttering the archive and Packages file with -dbg > packages that will (mostly) never be used, how about mandating a "debug" > target in library debian/rules files, so that when someone does need the > debug package, it's trivial to build. Since the person most likely to > need the target is the package maintainer, there would be some incentive > to make sure it works. When I have needed to debug problems in the past, this has sometimes meant over a day of rebuilding large libraries when the problem covers several shared libraries. I would have saved hours if I could have just installed some prebuilt -dbg packages and run gdb. Even more importantly, I want to use the debug package matching the version *and build* the user reporting the problem has. If it's due to e.g. a buggy header in a build dependency causing a misbuild, I would miss this when I rebuild it. I have had this bite me in the past. I would personally support the requirement for every binary library package to have a separate -dbg package containing the debug symbols. Even if they don't get regularly used, they are worth it for when things go wrong. We can then just ask the user to install libfoo-dbg and send us a backtrace, whatever the package or library. For big and/or popular applications, it would also be nice to have -dbg symbols for them as well. If there are concerns over archive size, why don't we drop all static .a libraries at the same time. Given that in Debian we typically always link dynamically, is there a need for .a libraries in all but a handful of cases? > 2. Why a seperate -doc? API docs should be part of the -dev package. I'm > going to guess that for *most* libraries, the docs are a trivial part of > the size of the -dev package. For libraries using doxygen, it can generate megabytes of documentation, even for small libraries if you enable all the call graphs and things. Unless I'm actually developing using a particular library directly, I don't want disk space wasted by its docs. It also means less to download when autobuilding stuff. > For those with significant documentation, sure, a seperate -doc > makes sense, just as we do now. Agreed. Regards, Roger -- .''`. Roger Leigh : :' : Debian GNU/Linux http://people.debian.org/~rleigh/ `. `' Printing on GNU/Linux? http://gutenprint.sourceforge.net/ `- GPG Public Key: 0x25BFB848 Please GPG sign your mail.
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