Debian/Ubuntu-style -dev ports

[Thibaut Paumard]

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.