On Wed, 07 Apr 2010 07:38:12 +0200, Rémi Cardona <[email protected]> wrote:
> We (in gentoo) have spent a lot of time trying to figure out which > protos each app really needs. Now that the split has been done for so > long, I just don't see the advantage of merging them back. For distros who have already done the work, the advantage is minimal, aside from only needing to repackage one thing when changes are made. The people we're trying to reach with this are those people building From source. For people like me, who really can't rely on a distribution to be up to date enough, I end up installing protocol headers. Of course, they go stale if I don't keep on top of them, and so I get accidental version skew. Reducing the number of packages I have to track from 20 to 1 would avoid this almost entirely. For people who would like to try out current X server, mesa or driver bits, we stick them with a huge number of tiny packages to install to get stuff building. I was working with a hardware validation person just a few weeks ago; she had a list of some twenty modules required to build the current Intel driver and X server. > Or do we plan to break protos all over again? No, we keep trying to avoid that. At least we'll catch it sooner if more people are up-to-date with the protocol headers? Given that these packages all install only header files and have no dependencies, it's hard to see the value of breaking them up into separate packages. When we did the modularization work, we split things up into the smallest possible units. For my part, this was probably a habit learned From working on tiny embedded systems. For libraries and applications, I think that's a good thing as those things take real space on lots of machines and can introduce security issues. For header files, I'm having a hard time seeing the value and I know it's costing the time of a lot of people who help with the project. I don't want to merge the whole mess back together again, I think we're all happy to have the libraries and CLI applications live a separate life far from our daily activities. However, I do want to encourage people to develop and test stuff, and when it's reasonable, we should make that more convenient. In my ideal world, a user interested in trying out the latest driver bits for their video card would have to download two modules, the protocol headers and the X server/drivers. Just merging the protocol headers together gets us to four -- headers/server/video/evdev. Yeah, there are also kernel/mesa/libdrm issues, and we should figure out how to make that easier too. -- [email protected]
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