[gentoo-dev] ebuild design issue regarding some {I need the lib and api only}-DEPENDs

[Christian Parpart <trapni@gentoo.org>]

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Hi all,

well, regarding the request on bug 88490 [1] (and my own needs) I'm in a deep 
problem ;)

There *are* packages out there, that depend on (networking) client libraries 
(and their headers of course); 

for the general mysql ebuild, I'd propose the following splitup:
* dev-db/mysql-server (or myssqld)
* net-libs/libmysqlclient
* dev-db/mysql (a meta package that simply depends on both, for backward 
compat)

The reason is, that some packages need to talk to (SQL )servers, but some host 
installation do not need - or even want to (think about security policies) - 
a local (SQL) server;

Using the "minimal" useflag for this - IMHO - is a misuse of the idea of 
"minimal" semantically - as I do understand minimal in a way like "don't 
overbloat me with patches and other feature additions"-alike.

This idea of course is applicable for lots of more packages, but mysql is one 
use case where I myself ran into;

Do we have a general accepted gentoo policy for this?

And... any thoughts on this subject?

Regards,
Christian Parpart.

[1] http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=88490
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