Le 19/05/2016 15:40, Ryan Schmidt a écrit : > But I haven't understood why splitting things the way Debian/Ubuntu do with > their -dev packages would be helpful to us in any way.
Hi, It would have some usefulness, but also come with a load of trouble that the Debian/Ubuntu infrastructure alleviates: For one thing, the "-dev" packages contain a lot of stuff that the normal Linux user will never need, but the normal Macports user may need this stuff, since the ports fall back to being built on the user machine in a number of not-so-rare circumstance. Since all the software on a Debian/Ubuntu box is shipped with the package manager, not including this stuff by default really saves gigabytes of hard drive space, bandwidth, mirror space... but I guess most Macports users don't install the equivalent of a full OS plus hundreds of applications using macports, only the meaningful handful. In the Debian world, packages are built in headless virtualised environments that are thrown away after basically each package build, so each build only installs what is needed to build a specific package, and not anything that *conflicts* with this build. Bulding on consumer systems would mean that you would need to actively remove (or deactivate) possibly entire subsystems before a build can complete. Finally, the Debian/Ubuntu infrastructure provides for regression testing of the complex dependency relationships that emerge between all those tiny packages. Packages regularly become uninstallable or unbuildable in the testing or unstable branches, and developers are pinged semi-automatically to fix the issue in a timely fashion. I don't think Macports has the sort of manpower and resources to do all this automated quality assurance work... Just to say that the very fine package granularity is a nice feature of certain Linux distributions, that take a lot to support, and is probably not worth it in the case of Macports. Kind regards, Thibaut. _______________________________________________ macports-dev mailing list macports-dev@lists.macosforge.org https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-dev
