Donnie Berkholz wrote: [Mon Oct 24 2005, 11:37:03PM CDT]
> Now, the other side of the story. It's not true runtime dependence
> because it's not required for programs to run, only to compile. And the
> way I see it, things required for programs to compile are by definition
> DEPEND rather than RDEPEND.

I think I'm w/ spider on this one.  At the risk of initiating a semantic
scuffle, my view is that the DEPEND and RDEPEND variables exist solely
to tell portage what packages are needed for portage to produce a
fully-functional package.  A library w/ missing header dependencies is
clearly not fully-functional, so portage needs to include that
dependency even if it is a binary package that is being installed.  The 
way to do that is to include the dependency in RDEPEND, even if the name
seems to be not quite appropriate.

> The consequences of the two sides are like this, from what I can see:
> 
> 1) Headers are run-time and build-time deps
> 
> - - Headers have to be installed even when you're using purely binary
> packages, because they are supposedly needed at "runtime" for your
> packages to work.
> 
> - - Also, header packages can't be uninstalled after the build via
> depclean because they're specified as run-time dependencies.
> 
> 2) Headers are build-time deps only
> 
> - - Binary packages don't require the header packages.
> 
> - - Header packages can be unmerged after builds.
> 
> - - Packages requiring the headers have to DEPEND on them directly,
> because DEPENDs don't cascade. (Although this brings to mind the concept
> of some sort of cascadable DEPEND.)
> 
> 
> I'd like to hear what some other people think about this.

I've always been a big fan of the fact that by default we install
fully-capable packages that include headers, because it makes Gentoo
much more appealing to developers.  My group is working on some
cryo-microscopy software that incorporates quite a number of scientific
and graphical libraries, and setting up Ubuntu or Debian for one of our
project developers was a pain as I struggled to ensure that I had all of
the necessary development packages installed.

At the same time, I'm suppose that including header files by default is
not such a good thing for the embedded folks.

-g2boojum-
-- 
Grant Goodyear	
Gentoo Developer
g2boojum@gentoo.org
http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum
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