[haiku-development] Re: Package Management - devel or not to devel?
- From: John Scipione <jscipione@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: "haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 3 Sep 2013 19:15:59 -0400
On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 4:07 PM, Alexander von Gluck
<kallisti5@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, 2013-09-03 at 21:00 +0200, Oliver Tappe wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On 2013-09-03 at 18:22:58 [+0200], Alexander von Gluck IV
>> <kallisti5@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> [ ... ]
>> >
>> > It was mentioned that CD's are the same size and haven't changed much.
>> > While
>> > this information is true, it really isn't a valid argument here. The
>> > majority of the packages that would contain "excessive" development
>> > resources wouldn't be on the installation CD.
Squabbling over a few megabytes is missing the point. The problem is
that devel packages prioritize disk usage over user friendliness for
the end user of the package manager and that is the wrong tradeoff to
make (IMHO of course). What fits on the install CD is irrelevant.
If we need more space we can move to a DVD based install.
On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 11:26 AM, Ingo Weinhold <ingo_weinhold@xxxxxx> wrote:
> Maybe someone can give some details on the negative use case that makes
> devel packages an "endless pain" and causes "untold hours of frustration". I
> can't relate at all. All I have to do on Linux (openSUSE) is a "zypper
> install foo-devel" to get foo's devel package (and foo itself, if it hadn't
> been installed before). I don't recall ever having experienced any pain or
> frustration doing that.
Yes, installing -devel packages is easy, but there are some
consequences of having separate -devel packages that cause
frustrations for the user (e.g. me).
The negative use case is that when you build something that optionally
requires a package and you don't have the devel package installed it
will (silently) not include support for that thing. For example if you
don't have libz-devel installed and you build ruby from the package
manager it will build ruby without libz support, then only much later,
after several hours of frustrated debugging you realize what happened
and why.
Also, some times software expects something in the -devel package to
be installed, but doesn't tell you that, and instead you get a strange
error message and associated headache.
This might seem like a trivial problem to solve, just install the
-devel package and rebuild, but, it is completely avoidable. You gain
very little practical advantages by having separate -devel packages,
but can create great problems for the user of the package manager.
If you were to put "No Devel Packages!" in large print on haiku-os.org
I bet you'd get a few downloads, and a few donations from frustrated
Linux users, that might be a good way to measure the pain caused by
this "feature".
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