newsbeuter - An RSS feed reader for text terminals

Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler at chello.at
Thu Feb 26 07:50:22 UTC 2009


Tom Lane wrote:
> File bugs.  I'm pretty sure that -devel packages are *required* to
> require their base packages.

A somewhat common idiom is that -devel Requires: -libs and not the whole
main package. The thought behind that is that packages can be a mix of
executables and libraries, you don't normally need the executables to build
stuff against the libraries. For example, strigi provides both indexing
libs (which can be used by pretty much everything which needs to analyze
files, KDE uses them instead of the old KFile classes) and a desktop search
daemon. You don't need the daemon to use the libs, the daemon just happens
to use those libs to provide desktop search. Having the -devel package drag
in the daemon would only annoy people trying to build KDE stuff and getting
the daemon forced on them and serve no useful purpose.

        Kevin Kofler




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