packaging system (was: Re: GCC 3.3.2 kernel)

[Lewis, Todd]

An excellent point, although I don't think it renders my point moot.  The
work I have done is on systems with small storage, meant for autonomous
operation after sale to a customer.  Nothing realtime or pure-embedded;
sorry if I offended any of the high-priests out there.

My argument is that a) some people need fine-grained control over what gets
installed, for storage-resource resons and others, and b) other than not
being what you're used to, fine granularity has very little cost.

To straw-man how this argument seems to go, here's my take on the old-timer
berkeley critique of debian:

"a) Everything should be done my/the-bsd/the-one-true way.  b) Therefore,
it's not worth it to build machinery to allow people to do things other
ways.  c) And plus, the way that debian does things by default is not my
way, therefore it's broken.  d) And plus, vis-a-vis (b), since debian's
machinery is unnecessary, I'm not going to learn it. e) Because of (d),
debian can't accommodate my needs, even though it actually can."

As someone who learned (at least some of) debian's facilities, I have
benefitted from using them over the years, and I know many others who, once
they saw what you could do with dpkg, picked it up and started benefitting
from it as well (on debian and on solaris, osf/1, even freebsd.)  Dragonfly
is an interesting project, and as long as you guys consider packaging within
your scope, (which considering the practical state of packaging in the bsd
world, I think is a good decision,) you should at least be aware of these
experiences.  Whoever is writing the code will have to make the decisions,
and we will all see what the result is.  I'm just trying to be helpful.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeroen Ruigrok/asmodai [mailto:asmodai at xxxxxx] 
Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2003 3:26 PM
Subject: Re: packaging system (was: Re: GCC 3.3.2 kernel)


-On [20031030 19:22], Lewis, Todd (todd.lewis at xxxxxx) wrote:
>4) You dislike the package/package-devel split?  Are you kidding me?  
>You would inflict header files on people building embedded systems 
>because you're too lazy to add a package name to your dependency list?  
>This is, again, a little egocentric.

I honestly wonder if you have done any embedded work, because I know from
experience embedded people almost (99.9999% of the cases _I_ know) use stock
source code and binaries.

Though it may sound harsh I do think this point is moot.

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Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven <asmodai(at)wxs.nl> / asmodai / kita no mono
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