On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 12:17 AM, Enrico Weigelt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > * Nirbheek Chauhan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> schrieb: > > I personally have no opinion about the -base and -server split, since > > I do not know enough about it. But I am firmly against the -docs split > > since the doc USE flag is for this use-case, and I see no reason why > > not to use it. > > Historically, the manuals (actually, electronic books - printed out > about 1k pages) have been an separate package from upstream. And this > for a good reason: they an different entitiy (even maintained by > different people), quite large and (un)related to the rest of PQ just > like an programming book to an invidiual compiler (note that it's also > contains of the most complete posix-SQL references in the OSS world).
Manuals, yes, documentation, not necessarily. Documentation is often *built* from the source code, or it's source is included with the package source code and docs are generated at compile-time. And as the Django and Python philosophy says, "No special case is special enough". Hence, USE=doc gives documentation. Whether generated from source, generated with it, or downloaded and installed. > > > > Just stick a USE=doc on -base and be done with it > > This has an major drawback: requires to do an complete rebuild/reinstall > of the whole package if you just need the manual. When setting up an > new server, you normally don't need the complete manual installed > (assuming you're already confident w/ PQ), but you need it someday > later when you have to look up something and other media (web access > or printed out) are not convenient/available. Now, there are lots of similar examples where USE flags exist purely to pull in run-time deps that don't require the package to be recompiled for usage, and not being able to specify such deps in an ebuild is a deficiency on the package manager side. The proper solution is to fix the package manager, not to split out such things into separate packages. It generates chaos and inconsistency in the tree, and only delays the fixing of the package manager by giving half-baked solutions. > > I, personally, don't *need* it at all, but having an separate package > makes it more convenient. And I don't see any reasons against that > split as long as people are willing to maintain it. One reason I can think of is that people expect USE=doc to give them documentation. They expect that a "doc" USE flag on a package will give them the documentation. That's how Gentoo works, and so that's how people *expect* it to work. Having a special case for a package just to save a little build time is (imho) not worth the inconsistency. -- ~Nirbheek Chauhan -- gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
