Nicolas Williams wrote: > On Tue, Dec 09, 2008 at 05:17:22PM -0600, Shawn Walker wrote: >>> Letting users filter out headers is one thing, but having the system >>> jump through hoops to detect whether you might need them is another. >>> And doing that by default strikes me as asking for lots of pain. >> From a user's perspective, they don't really care what hoops the system >> has to jump through. In fact, they expect the system to jump through >> hoops for them :-) >> >> [...] >> Again, why install headers if you don't have any software that needs them? > > My bias is that I like headers to be installed whether or not developer > tools are installed. DTrace, in particular, seems likely to always be > installed as tools built on DTrace proliferate. Thus excluding headers > unless other pkgs need them seems like a waste of engineer resources to > me. > > Perhaps my perspective is all wrong. I'll concede that if my > perspective is wrong then indeed, the system should jump through those > hoops.
I think that's the point here; right now, our userbase is primarly developer-focused. However, in the future there are going to be many different types of users, and to assume that they all will have/use/can use DTrace (regardless of coolness) is a bad assumption. The majority of GNU/Linux distributions I used in the past never installed headers by default. If you wanted headers for a particular package, you had to install the -devel package for it. Not only did this speed up installation times, it also saved disk space, bandwidth, and gave me the feeling that I was in more control over my own system. Cheers, -- Shawn Walker _______________________________________________ pkg-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-discuss
