On Wed, 2006-05-10 at 13:00, Martin Man wrote: > Peter Tribble wrote: > > On Tue, 2006-05-09 at 16:26, Martin Man wrote: > >> splitting into -devel is good IMHO, because > >> > >> 1) users don't need gcc and header files and static libs > >> 2) developers can always install them > >> 3) it saves space, and yes, space is still important as it was before > >> even if we have bigger drives and more memory -> think Java vs. flash, > >> or Linux live distro on USB flash drive > > > > So don't install the gcc package. There aren't static libs (although > > I think we still have some lint libraries that are quite big), and > > headers are generally small compared to the app itself. > > I hope the fact that solaris does not have static libs does not > invalidate my comment about granularity of the packages and package > splitting,
Of course not. > another example could be apache and apache-doc. And I think > we can agree on the fact that you don't need apache-doc installed on a > cluster of production webservers. Well I wouldn't use a packaged apache in the first place. Getting it right is too important. However, the point is that you're making the packaging granularity decision based on what's right for apache, rather than to meet the needs of the build system, a particular implementation of virtualization technology, or the need to support diskless clients, so that's a good way to split it. > > Besides, I feel that if you want to customise at that level, asking > > the package system to do the work for you is doing it wrong. > > If the package system is the one wrong to ask, whom should I ask then to > do the customization? Are you suggesting that if I want to make a small > solaris distro that I should delete unnecessary files manually? Absolutely. If your needs for customization go beyond do or don't install staroffice [or insert package name here], then you're going to have to work harder. For example, if you wanted to make a small x86 distro then you might decide to sacrifice 64-bit capability. This might save you 200M - worth doing, but cannot be done by selecting packages. Or take a package such as SUNWpng. This supplies 4 libraries, some of which are active and some of which are for compatibility only. You could do a dependency analysis and observe that your distro only needs 2 of them. Should the package be split up into many fragments just in case someone might wish to do this? -- -Peter Tribble L.I.S., University of Hertfordshire - http://www.herts.ac.uk/ http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
