On Thursday 05 Jun 2008, Lennart Sorensen wrote: > I think many people don't realize that installing a system is hard. I > think most computer users would have difficulty installing windows if > their system hadn't come with it pre installed.
Agreed. I've installed Windows too many times. Modern Linux distros are easier. You don't need a keygen, for a start :) > > [Gentoo] > > didn't seem to offer anything special over Debian apart from the > > fact of there being no more need for -dev packages. > If they don't have -dev packages, that means every system is wasting > space on header files that it probably doesn't need. Given the price per gigabyte of HDD space nowadays, that's hardly a problem. I found it highly counterintuitive that when package foo said it needed bar and libbaz, and I had bar and libbaz installed, it still wouldn't build. Because what it *really* meant was that it needed bar, libbaz, bar-dev and libbaz-dev -- the files in the -dev packages would already have been there, of course, if I had built bar and libbaz from Source. I know all that *now*, of course. (And you can't have got to where you are now without knowing it.) I just don't think anybody else should ever have to go through all the wailing and gnashing of teeth that I had to. Back in the days when HDD space was expensive and internet connections were slow and/or metred, there might have been some merit in separating out -dev packages. But nowadays, they are More Trouble Than They Are Worth. Building packages from Source is **not** intrinsically hard, but separate -dev packages make it harder than it needs to be. Building a "minimised" system is a sufficiently specialised job that anyone who is trying to do that, probably will have a good idea what files they can comfortably live without. I think The Rest Of Us generally like the convenience of automatically-installed packages (whether they be downloaded as Source and compiled locally, as in Gentoo, or downloaded pre-compiled as in Debian and Others) whenever possible, but occasionally have some special need that a package maintainer didn't think of (or need to mix licences and create an unredistributable package in doing so). And that's when the whole -dev ugliness comes into play. Even if -dev wasn't to be done away with altogether, it would be nice at least to have an option in apt to make it automatically fetch corresponding -dev packages whenever they existed. -- AJS delta echo bravo six four at earthshod dot co dot uk -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
