packaging system (was: Re: GCC 3.3.2 kernel)

[ichel Talon]

ibotty <me at xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:3fa25105$0$80977$415eb37d at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx: 

>> 
> this is exactly what debian (and some rpm-distributions) do.
> they just split the (one) package into three.
> 
> this has some advantages:
> packages are way smaller.
> (e.g.: libfreetype6 340,9kB, libfreetype6-dev 676,1kB)
>

This has zero advantage, except for embedded work (and people doing
embedded work are able to do rm -rf /usr/include in their final
distribution). Present day disks are minimum 50 Gigs, you can put all
the includes and all the docs you want without ever encountering the
slightest space problem. This stupidity of breaking packages into small
parts is the  biggest nuisance by far i have with Linux distributions 
(either rpm or debian ones). On 80 Linux machines we have in our lab i
cannot find one which has the necessary include files each time i want
to compile something. Not having the root passwd i cannot install the 
devel packages. Moreover Linux people push this sort of idea to extreme 
absurdity. Once i installed the gcc compiler on a machine and was not
able to compile a single program, because crtbegin.o or something
similar was absent. I tried to chase where this fucking thing was
packaged in, only to be told that it was in libc6-dev !! In other words
the great Debian packagers discovered in their infinite wisdom that
someone who installs a compiler does so only for the pleasure of
admiring assembly code. Please, in any BSD distro, don't listen to
people who have failed miserably providing something convenient.