Donnie Berkholz wrote: [Mon Oct 24 2005, 11:37:03PM CDT] > Now, the other side of the story. It's not true runtime dependence > because it's not required for programs to run, only to compile. And the > way I see it, things required for programs to compile are by definition > DEPEND rather than RDEPEND.
I think I'm w/ spider on this one. At the risk of initiating a semantic scuffle, my view is that the DEPEND and RDEPEND variables exist solely to tell portage what packages are needed for portage to produce a fully-functional package. A library w/ missing header dependencies is clearly not fully-functional, so portage needs to include that dependency even if it is a binary package that is being installed. The way to do that is to include the dependency in RDEPEND, even if the name seems to be not quite appropriate. > The consequences of the two sides are like this, from what I can see: > > 1) Headers are run-time and build-time deps > > - - Headers have to be installed even when you're using purely binary > packages, because they are supposedly needed at "runtime" for your > packages to work. > > - - Also, header packages can't be uninstalled after the build via > depclean because they're specified as run-time dependencies. > > 2) Headers are build-time deps only > > - - Binary packages don't require the header packages. > > - - Header packages can be unmerged after builds. > > - - Packages requiring the headers have to DEPEND on them directly, > because DEPENDs don't cascade. (Although this brings to mind the concept > of some sort of cascadable DEPEND.) > > > I'd like to hear what some other people think about this. I've always been a big fan of the fact that by default we install fully-capable packages that include headers, because it makes Gentoo much more appealing to developers. My group is working on some cryo-microscopy software that incorporates quite a number of scientific and graphical libraries, and setting up Ubuntu or Debian for one of our project developers was a pain as I struggled to ensure that I had all of the necessary development packages installed. At the same time, I'm suppose that including header files by default is not such a good thing for the embedded folks. -g2boojum- -- Grant Goodyear Gentoo Developer [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum GPG Fingerprint: D706 9802 1663 DEF5 81B0 9573 A6DC 7152 E0F6 5B76
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