Graham Murray [10 Jun 2002 06:54:07 +0100]:

Philipp Thomas writes:

What is the rational for providing separate *-dev.rpm packages rather than including the headers etc in the "standard" package?

It's mostly saving space.

The headers do not (normally) take up much space

Oh, headers can take up quite a bit of space, specially in the case of xdevel. xdevel is unpacked ~10MiB, with headers taking 2.5 MiB.

and the libXXX.so.n has to included (in the normal package) in order for programs to use it,

It's the symlink libxxx.so that's included in the -devel package.

so why not include everything in the one package?

You forget that -devel packages can contain quite bit of additional stuff: - There's the static libraries (*only* possibly needed when compiling) - additional configuration stuff (in case of xdevel it's /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/config, i.e. the whole imake configury) - Documentation that's only interesting for developers (API docu, man pages for library functions). - Sample code. - Extra development tools (like moc from Qt). That all can sum up quite nicely and even if it's not much for one package, the sum of all development packages does represent a noticeable sum. Why should those that never compile a package of their own waste space for stuff they don't need? Philipp