Hi Daniel, On Sun, Dec 13, 2009 at 09:34:53PM -0500, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote: > tags 560786 + wontfix > thanks > > On Sat, Dec 12, 2009 at 08:22:12PM +1030, Ron wrote: > > Not all machines that it's useful to be able to run gdb on > > also need or want python installed. Can we please make this > > extra dependency optional? > > No, we can't. You build GDB either with or without linking to Python. > I don't see a reason to split the GDB package into two and double its > archive size for this.
I do appreciate, and share, your concern for not bloating the archive needlessly, but my concern is balancing that against the needs of small Debian systems, where the extra deps this drags in are of themselves a quite substantial and needless extra bloat. They are considerably larger than gdb is itself, and needing to put extra flash on a board, just to install python, which the board itself will never use, hits a much harder limit than an extra 4MB package in the archive would. Ideally this should really be some sort of runtime dependency, otherwise what happens when people also add perl, lua, ruby, etc. etc. bindings to do the same thing as this python dep does? If that can't be done, then we do have precedent with things like vim, for providing both a -minimal and a -with-the-lot package for people. Anyhow, I'm serious about wanting/needing developer support for these sort of systems, so the main question is how Debian is going to provide that best. Other options I see right now are: - libgdb-dev appears to be unused, and itself recommends that it never should be. That's the size of 2 gdb .debs itself, so if you really want to remain "archive neutral", we could trade it for a gdb-minimal package, and wind up using less archive space in the deal. - I ITP a separate package, that just removes the --with-python option passed to configure. That's my least favourite option in terms of bloat, but if the issue is that you don't _want_ to maintain this extra package yourself, then I can appreciate that, and am prepared to do that work myself rather than having it foisted upon you by the TC or similar. I'd really rather just send you a patch that does this from the same source package though, but whether it is worth my time to do that, depends on the detailed rationale for your making this wontfix. Simply removing the python dep is a much more trivial change if I have to go that way to resolve this. I've cc'd -devel, as others may have even better or simpler solutions, but I'd appreciate your guidance on the best way to move forward with solving this from here. Thanks, Ron -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
