Re: [gentoo-dev] PostgreSQL Status

[Enrico Weigelt]

* Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbheek.chauhan@×××××.com> schrieb:

> >  Would be different if you'd said "we don't need to split since we
> >  have useflags" or "we want to stay as near to upstream as possible"
> >  instead of "we're not debian". Being different, just to be
> >  different is really too pubertal for me ;-o
> >
>
> The person you were replying to is a Gentoo Council member, elected by
> the very devs that run Gentoo. I believe one should try and look
> deeper in the meaning of such a man's words before labelling them as
> "pubertal".

Well, this is my personal feeling, and this is totally independent from 
his position.

I've just got headaches with this "we're not debian" argumentation.
Surely there are technical reasons to do certain things different than
other distros, and so we should talk about exactly about these points.
(problem -> analyis -> solution). 

Just insisting on being different isn't a technical reason, just an 
pubertal behaviour (well, there are good reasons for this behaviour in 
that that age, eg. becoming independent from the parent generation).
This reminds me on the "anti-fascist" folks here in Germany, who tend to 
define themselves on being "against fascists" and declaring everyone with 
different opponions to be one (note that Germany never had noticable fascist 
movements - we had national socialists, but that's very different ;-O)

> The words of a veteran usually aren't written in blind emotion or with
> prejudice.

Might be. But in this case, I really feel different.

Please let's talk about concepts and practises of other distros objectively,
leaving out personal antipathies. Every one has different views and needs,
and technical decisions should derive them them, not from personal taste.

So for example the splitting issue has to be decided for each package. 

As we're currently talking about PostgreSQL, we have to look at the 
possible ways to do (or not to do) so with it and weight the pros and
cons of the different options.

This decision process should be individual to each package - there is
no (good) universal answer. If you try to declare an universal answer
to everyone, you get religious ;-P

> >  Right, binary distros have a much bigger presure on that, but this
> >  doesn't mean that splitting is always bad.
>
> There are specific use-cases where splitting is good, such as with
> gstreamer, gtk-sharp, gnome-python{,-desktop,-extras} which are
> essentially dependencies of other packages, and where built_with_use
> checks are horrid to use.

Yes, and there a lots of them. 

Classical example: language bindings for certain libs. They really 
should be different packages. But, of course, the fault mostly comes
from the upstream and individual distros aren't the right place to
fix this (again, one of the reasons why I founded the OSS-QM project).

> 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).

> 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.

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.


cu
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