[HEADSUP] Staging, packaging and more

[olli hauer]

On 2013-10-04 08:18, Marcus von Appen wrote:
> On, Thu Oct 03, 2013, Fernando Apesteguía wrote:
> 
>> El 03/10/2013 22:41, "Marcus von Appen" <mva at freebsd.org> escribió:
>>>
>>> On, Thu Oct 03, 2013, Nathan Whitehorn wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 10/03/13 07:17, Andriy Gapon wrote:
>>>>> on 03/10/2013 11:48 Baptiste Daroussin said the following:
>>>>>> This also allows lots of new features to come:
>>>>>> - Allow to create sub-packages
>>>>>> - Allow to create debuginfo packages.
>>>>> I'd like to mention a few other possibilities along the same lines:
>>>>> - doc packages
>>>>> - examples packages
>>>>> - "devel" packages (headers, tools and other files required for
>> compiling
>>>>> dependent software, but not generally needed for an end user)
>>>>
>>>> Please no devel packages.
>>>
>>> Seconded.
>>
>> What's wrong with devel packages?
> 
> It complicates things for developers and custom software on
> FreeBSD. The typical situation that I see on most Linux platforms is a
> lot of confusion by people, why their custom software XYZ does not
> properly build - the most common answer: they forgot to install a
> tremendous amount of dev packages, containing headers, build tools and
> whatnot.
> On FreeBSD, you can rely on the fact that if you installed e.g. libGL,
> you can start building your own GL applications without the need to
> install several libGL-dev, libX11-dev, ... packages first.
> This is something, which I personally see as a big plus of the FreeBSD
> ports system and which makes FreeBSD attractive as a development platform.
> 

I share your arguments from the developer perspective, but having the
ability to do sub-packages doesn't mean until now a port will be chopped
into binary, header, man, debug, docs, examples ...

I see also a big improvement with sub-packages, there are many ports
that are build twice at the moment because we do not have sub-packages.
For example:
- (postgresql|mysql|bacula|...)-(server|client)
- apr-util (install backend support without rebuilding everything)

So sub-packages are the right thing to do, but the default sub-packages
should be discussed.

-- 
olli