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Stuart Herbert wrote:
| Hi,
|
| I was building a RedHat Enterprise Server box this afternoon, and it
set me
| thinking a bit. For years now, RedHat have split a lot of their packages
| into two sets ... a set containing what's needed at runtime to use the
| package, and another 'devel' package containing header files etc which
are
| only needed for building software.
|
| One thing that it's really nice to do with a server is build it with no
| compilers etc installed. The less that's on there, the less there is to
| maintain, upgrade, be reused by the black hats, etc etc.
|
| RedHat makes that very easy to do. Gentoo supports binary packages,
but we
| don't split out the runtime stuff from the type of files which RedHat
put in
| their 'devel' packages.
|
| My question is - why not?
Because upstream doesn't distribute it as such, in 99% of cases? In
general, I see Gentoo following how upstream would prefer to see things
distributed, and this doesn't seem to be the typical case for that
preference.
One good example of your suggestion in action is freedesktop.org xlibs
- -- there are separate header-only packages that could theoretically (I
think) simply be removed after everything's been compiled.
I think that if there's interest in this, we should reduce the workload
on ourselves and attempt to push it upstream.
| I have an idea about how we could go about implementing this. Rather
than
| adding (f.ex) a libjpeg-devel package, we could enhance Portage to
support a
| second image directory. Ebuilds could then put runtime files into
${D} as
| normal, and 'devel' files into (f.ex) ${I} (it's a shame that ${D} was
chosen
| for the image directory ;-)
This sounds like a ridiculous amount of work that I have absolutely no
interest in. I'll be happy to accept patches to implement it in any
packages I maintain, however.
I imagine my attitude will be fairly common, so whoever's interested had
better be prepared for a significant workload.
Wish you the best of luck in this -- it could be very useful for some
people.
Donnie
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