packaging system (was: Re: GCC 3.3.2 kernel)

[Lewis, Todd]

"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)."

If you think that hand-removing files managed by the package manager is a
kosher way of dealing with this problem, then you totally don't understand
where we're coming from.  It's a completely different mindset: the package
manager should manage all system files.  The question is, how do you build a
packaging system that lets you reach that goal.

I made the userspace a.out -> elf transition on a debian box by firing up
dselect and pressing the "enter" key 7 times.  What would have happened if I
had installed a monolithic library package and then manually deleted include
files?  They'd be put right back in.  You want a package manager that you
can work with, not that you ignore or circumvent.

Or, at least, that's what I want, and with Debian I have it.

-----Original Message-----
From: ichel Talon [mailto:talon at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Saturday, November 01, 2003 9:28 AM
Subject: Re: packaging system (was: Re: GCC 3.3.2 kernel)


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.