[haiku-development] Re: Package Management - devel or not to devel?
- From: Ryan Leavengood <leavengood@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: "haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 3 Sep 2013 11:46:37 -0400
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.
In the last few years, when I've used Linux I've mainly used Ubuntu
and Arch. I can't say I've had endless pain in trying to do
development in Ubuntu where there are development packages, but I will
say Arch was a breath of fresh air in NOT having them.
It might be more of a case of being easier and simpler in not having
the development packages than them causing a bunch of pain. Though for
poorly documented projects it can be quite frustrating trying to
figure out what is needed to compile and then having to install those
development packages, but it may be unfair to blame that on the
packaging system.
If Haiku can do it "right", it might not be so bad.
I do agree with Rene that disk space is no longer virtually infinite
with SSDs, so there is no reason to be unnecessarily wasteful.
With all this said, I could envision there being a setting for the
package management system which always installs the -devel packages
when the main package is installed (assuming the -devel package
exists.) This then can satisfy both camps without being a bad
compromise. For that reason (and just for clarity), it might be nice
if -devel packages were linked with their associated main package more
tightly than just naming, such as each having a reference to the
other. I don't know if this is already there.
Obviously it still complicates life a bit for the packagers to have to
create separate -devel packages, so I think that is a down side.
--
Regards,
Ryan
Other related posts: