[HEADSUP] Staging, packaging and more

[Baptiste Daroussin]

On Fri, Oct 04, 2013 at 08:18:33AM +0200, 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.
> 

On the other ends, that makes the package fat for embedded systems, that also
makes some arbitrary runtime conflicts between packages (because they both
provide the same symlink on the .so, while we could live with 2 version at
runtime), that leads to tons of potential issue while building locally, and
that makes having sometime insane issues with dependency tracking. Why having
.a, .la, .h etc in production servers? It could greatly reduce PBI size, etc.

Personnaly I do have no strong opinion in one or another direction. Should we be
nicer with developers? with end users? with embedded world? That is the question
to face to decide if -devel packages is where we want to go or not.

regards,
Bapt
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