Andreas Voegele wrote:
>
> No, but even on my notebook with a "small" 1.2 GB hard disk the
> development packages occupy only 10 percent of the space, which IMHO
> isn't much. I don't think that some space saving justifies the
> overhead required to split packages.
>
> I neither use GNOME nor KDE at home, and when I switched to Mandrake I
> didn't like the fact that Window Maker pulled in the GNOME libraries
> and that the vorbis-tools pulled in the kdelibs indirectly. But on
> the other hand, it would probably be a nightmare to split these
> packages into several smaller packages or create alternative packages
> in order to get rid of some dependencies.
My idea is that this problem should be sent to the authors of the
software which use GNOME/KDE libs and not on this list (but I'm not
flaming you, ok, just stating my opinion). Either the software is called
"gfoo" or "kfoo", which would mean clearly that KDE or GNOME is expected
for the program to run, either you can say that the programmer is too
stupid to use GNOME/KDE libs without daring to mention it ("hey Joe, if
we call it kfoo, half of the people won't use our wonderful opensource
largest project ever, I could not stand that from happening, let's stick
to a less specific name!").
> I think that binary distributions like Mandrake should keep things
> simple and build packages with the maximum number of dependencies.
What does that mean? You have to set up the *needed* dependencies for
the software to work : no minimum, no maximum, only the Good Stuff. In
fact, it is more difficult to find out what is actually needed, than
adding useless and as such annoying dependencies, what I suppose you
call "maximum number of dependencies". Dependencies are good as long as
you don't need to install 100 MB of libs to use an applet.
> Alternatives are distributions like Gentoo Linux
> (http://www.gentoo.org/). Gentoo's base system is distributed in
> binary form but the rest of the system (GNOME, KDE etc.) is built from
> the source according to the administrators settings.
I will have to get there.
> Of course, it would be nice, if it was possible to build Mandrake in
> the same way...
Sign the petition for the Holy Minimal Install... <laugh>
Grégoire
