packaging system (was: Re: GCC 3.3.2 kernel)

[Diego Calleja García]

El 01 Nov 2003 14:27:37 GMT ichel Talon <talon at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> escribió:


> 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

You must have a lot of money for disks (and free buses) ;)
Bandwith is important, and not only for the users; mirrors would be
happy too.	

If you are downloading a binary package it's supposed you won't need
most of the development files. Handling source packages is easy, since
they have "source dependencies" so you can install the source
of a given program and/or recompiling it with one command.

> to compile something. Not having the root passwd i cannot install the 
> devel packages. Moreover Linux people push this sort of idea to extreme 

you won't need root to do "apt-src install libc6" ;)

> 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

Luckly, you can do "auto-apt run <command>" ;) and if <command> try to
access some file which don't exists but it can be provided by some
package; it'll pause the process, it'll install the package, and the
process will continue as if nothing would have happened. 

> admiring assembly code. Please, in any BSD distro, don't listen to
> people who have failed miserably providing something convenient.

I'd not say debian has failed, apt itself is very nice for example,
and debconf is quite interesting too. It's not perfect but
it has several good ideas...