On Mon, Nov 9, 2020 at 10:37 PM Joerg Jaspert wrote:
> More and more packages are being uploaded into the Debian archive which
> are only ever used for building packages. These are not only never
> intended to be installed onto an end-user's system, they are even
> actively discouraged from being used directly by a user. The two
> currently most notable examples are packages used by the Go and Rust
> programming languages and their ecosystem, but there well may be
> others[1].
Does this include the -dev packages for C/etc libraries?
No, those are useful for people writing C programs outside of packaging.
I guess it also applies to Haskell and other statically-linked languages.
https://wiki.debian.org/StaticLinking
It's not the static linking that's the issue, it's that go (and rust I assume) packages do not install things on the default search path of the compiler. I don't know whether haskell does or not. The -dev packages for C libraries definitely do!
> The current proposal is to reduce the main Packages.xz files size by
> splitting[4] out all of the packages that are not intended for users,
> writing those into an own file. Those packages would have a section of
> "buildlibs", independent of their other properties.
Should (almost?) everything in the existing libdevel section move to
the new buildlibs section?
I don't think so.
Cheers,
mwh