Re: tlug: PJE

[Chris Sekiya <chris@example.com>]

On Fri, 21 Aug 1998, Scott Stone wrote:

> the libfoo-devel package would contain the static (.a) library and the
> .so link (or not, and let ldconfig make it), for compiling dynamic
> executables.  The header files would be installed with the -devel
> package, as they're only needed when compiling, and you can't compile
> without the .a or .so file anyway, so they belong together. 

I'm appalled.

Let's say that I'm Joe User.  I've had this TurboLinux thingie installed
in my computer for about eight months.  I'm taking a few programming
courses at the local community college, and I want to try out a few of the
example programs from my textbook on my home computer.

One of these programs illustrates the use of the curses library.  Well,
I've got curses installed on my computer because I hit 'y' when the
installer asked me if I wanted to install it.  I make sure that it hasn't
accidentally been deleted by doing a 'ls -l /usr/lib/libcurses*' ... sure
enough, I've got a 'libcurses.so.99' there, so I go ahead and try to
compile.

Well, of course, it doesn't work.  I read the manual, which says that I
need to install the libcurses-devel package in order to use it.  I look at
the size required ... hmmm, about 150Kb.  Should be able to fit.  Now
everything works okay.

I mention this in passing a couple of days later to a friend who knows
more about programming than I.  He says that the "header files" (which is
what the compiler complained about) only took about 10Kb of space, and
that I didn't really need to link against libcurses.a -- in fact, the
linker will use libcurses.so unless it's explicitly told otherwise.

"Well," I say, "if all I needed were 10Kb worth of header files, why
didn't the guys who made TurboLinux include them in the package that's
labelled 'libcurses'?  Why did I have to install this other junk in order
to get those headers?  Why is the header package called 'devel', when it
should actually be called something like 'static'?"

My friend shrugs, and makes a disparaging comment about bloat.

Just my 2.8 yen (or whatever the exchange rate is this hour),

-- Chris

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