On Wed, 2006-05-10 at 19:02, Dave Miner wrote: > Martin Man wrote: > > > > Well, even if at the moment devel stuff is just noise, it will probably > > not be noise in the future... Just look at all linux distros, there is > > no reason to believe that solaris will go different path... > > > > My observation is that they go to great lengths to provide separate > packages, but it's not clear at all how much difference it makes in the > size of the installation when all's said and done. Anyone have actual > numbers on a current Fedora or something?
A quick look at solaris 10 (x86) shows include files in total 100M out of 3G. OK, so 100M isn't tiny, but 40M of that is actually part of gcc. Even so, include files are only about 3% - there are lots of other ways to cut down a distribution much more than that. > What I do know is that it's a real pain to chase down all the things you > need once you decide that you need to compile something. Much profanity > usually ensues ;-), Indeed. Sometime about 1999/2000 I gave up trying to be smart and just installed all the developer support (headers, docs, whatever) by default on all systems. And gave up trying to share shared components via NFS. It was so much of a headache to manage in the first place, gave absolutely no benefits, and created no end of trouble when something else needed what you hadn't installed. > even if you have a comparatively sophisticated > package manager and fast, reliable network repositories from which to > install those additions. If you had that, why wouldn't you simply install the binary rather than having to rebuild from source? If the repository knows about the app you're trying to install, chances are it's already got a prebuilt version. (I'm perverse and prefer to compile from source, but that's because I do servers. For desktop apps I would much rather have prebuilt binaries.) -- -Peter Tribble L.I.S., University of Hertfordshire - http://www.herts.ac.uk/ http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
