Packaging: A need for a devel package?

[Matthias Saou]

Ingvar Hagelund wrote :

> Repost, just to make sure it comes through after the greylisting problem.
> 
> I am putting some effort in the (RedHat) rpm package again. I got a
> question about a devel package. Usually, on RedHat based systems, one
> typically puts things like static libraries and header files in a devel
> package, like "varnish-libs-devel-1.0.3-5.i386.rpm" for instance.
> 
> Now, I wonder: Would it be appropriate with a devel package at all? Is
> it thinkable that anyone would use varnish technology to build things
> outside varnish itself? If so, I could use a list of actual header files
> and a suggestion on where to put them (/usr/include/varnish?), and maybe
> some starting point hacking documentation, if that's feasible.
> 
> If this seems nonsense, please tell, and I'll just skip the devel
> package.

From what Dag-Erling answered, it seems like the devel package might
make sense. If you do decide to have one, your example above isn't good
(at least for Red Hat and Fedora, SuSE, Mandriva and others do things
differently), as you would need to have for instance :

varnish (the main package with the daemon)
varnish-libs
varnish-devel (and not "varnish-libs-devel")

The "libs" only make sense to split out if some programs could require
them without requiring the main daemon. Again, from what Dag-Erling
wrote, maybe this would make sense if someone writes a varnishlog file
parser.

Attached are the files I used to build the latest varnish package I
used, in case they can be of any help.

Matthias

-- 
Clean custom Red Hat Linux rpm packages : http://freshrpms.net/
Fedora Core release 6 (Zod) - Linux kernel 2.6.20-1.2943.fc6
Load : 0.30 0.29 0.27
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