Re: [gentoo-dev] PostgreSQL Status

[Nirbheek Chauhan]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 10:37 PM, Enrico Weigelt <weigelt@×××××.de> wrote:
> * Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbheek.chauhan@×××××.com> schrieb:
>
>
>  > >  It's bad, just because Debian does it ?!
>  >
>  > Yes, because their technical design is different from Gentoo's.
>
>  Still too religious ;-P

Of course, that's your opinion to have and keep.

>
>  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".

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

>
>  > Debian/$binary_distro have to split up packages because they have no
>  > other way of mapping configure flags to what the user wants to
>  > install. Gentoo does, and they're called USE flags.
>
>  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.

>  Think of all these useflag-deps, which often wouldn't be necessary
>  if the packages would be split in finer granularity.
>  Of course, this is mostly the upstream's fault.

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.

Just stick a USE=doc on -base and be done with it

-- 
~Nirbheek Chauhan
-- 
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