[HEADSUP] Staging, packaging and more

[Bryan Drewery]

On Fri, Oct 04, 2013 at 09:01:58AM +0200, Baptiste Daroussin wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 04, 2013 at 08:57:53AM +0200, Erwin Lansing wrote:
> > On Fri, Oct 04, 2013 at 08:32:59AM +0200, Baptiste Daroussin wrote:
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > 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.
> > > 
> > 
> > If we chose to go down that path, at least we should chose a different
> > name as we've used the -devel suffix for many years for developmental
> > versions.
> > 
> > I must agree that it is one of the things high on my list of things that
> > irritate me with several Linux distributions but I can see the point for
> > for embedded systems as well.  But can't we have both?  Create three
> > packages, a default full package and split packages of -bin, -lib,
> > and even -doc.  My first though twas to make the full package a
> > meta-package that would install the split packages in the background,
> > but that would probably be confusing for users at the end of the day, so
> > rather just have it be a real package.
> > 
> I do like that idea very much, and it is easily doable with stage :)

+1 to splitting packages for embedded usage.

> 
> regards,
> Bapt


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