[HEADSUP] Staging, packaging and more

[Bernhard Fröhlich]

On Sun, Oct 6, 2013 at 2:20 PM, Ulrich Spörlein <uqs at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 2013/10/4 Bryan Drewery <bryan at shatow.net>:
>> 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.
>
> -1 for the split, as it will not fix anybody's problem.
>
> On regular machines, disk space is cheap and having to install more
> packages is just annoying to users. Think of the time wasted that
> people are told to apt-get libfoo-dev before they can build anything
> from github, or similar.
>
> If you actually *are* space constricted on your tiny embedded machine,
> what the fuck are you doing with the sqlite database and all the
> metadata about ports/packages anyway? Just rm /usr/include and
> /usr/share/doc, /usr/share/man, etc. when building your disk image.
> But you are doing that already anyway, so this solves no actual
> problem for you.
>
> My two cents
> Uli

I also don't see why we need to optimize our packages for an embedded
environment that is usually very customized. Wouldn't it make more sense to
provide some proper port / packaging options/flags that help to optimize
size of the packages without touching header files? People could use that
flags and poudriere to build their packages together with all their other
compiler flags and cpu optimisations.

-- 
Bernhard Froehlich
http://www.bluelife.at/