Donnie Berkholz wrote: [Tue Oct 25 2005, 04:28:17AM CDT]
> I'm still failing to see how headers have anything to do with runtime 
> issues -- it should be people's responsibility to ensure they have the 
> necessary headers if they're compiling things that require them. And 
> compiling means DEPEND.

It's possible that I'm being particularly dense today, but at least at
the moment it seems fairly simple to me.  DEPEND means that portage
requires the dep for the current package to build successfully.
RDEPEND, on the other hand, lists dependencies that users of a package
will need down the road, after it's installed on the system.  So, for
example, libfoo might not require that boost be installed for it to
build, but libfoo might export a header file that imports
boost/tuple.hpp.  If boost isn't in libfoo's RDEPEND, then when user
Fred installs libfoo from a binary package and tries to use libfoo's
header files in development, a rude shock is likely.

> Maybe for some people compiling is included in runtime, but I'm not one 
> of them.

I am.  I frequently compile software against installed libraries in my
day job.  I don't run into this problem solely because I don't install
binary packages.

My apologies if I'm missing the point here.

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