[ On Saturday, November 13, 2004 at 23:43:00 (+0000), Gavan Fantom wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: problems with packages (was Re: CVS commit: src/distrib/sets)
>
> There are some packages which clearly should be split. A perfect example 
> is gcc and its run-time libraries.

One could use that line of reasoning to argue that all shared libraries
should be split from the packages that supply them.

Indeed one could even use that kind of logic to aruge that all
libraries, including static libraries and their header files (and maybe
even the manual pages that go along with them), should be split off into
separate packages as well.

However all that speaks to is the insanity of how libraries (and such)
are handled in the current packaging system.  Things are getting better,
but even the sledge-hammer approaches like pkg_views don't solve all the
real problems that people want solved.  :-)

One of the most blatant counter-examples I had in mind from my recent
exploits in pkgsrc was the totally illogical separation of _all_ of the
_standard_ Cyrus-SASL-2.x plugin modules into separate pacakges.  Sure
it might be nice to have the Kerberos plugin separate (since it can't be
built on systems without Kerberos), and so on, but there's no logic to
separating out all the other common _standard_ modules too.

(And I won't say anything about the total insanity of using dynamic
loading in a core security subsystem!  Suffice it to say I've managed to
hammer everthing in cyrus-sasl2 back into its proper static block.  :-)

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

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