ANNOUNCE: xfdashboard 0.3.1 released

Ralf Mardorf ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net
Fri Aug 29 08:12:16 CEST 2014


On Fri, 2014-08-29 at 15:55 +1000, Rob McCathie wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 29, 2014 at 1:49 PM, Marshall Neill <ramien43 at windstream.net> wrote:
> > After I installed the -dev for libgarcon and libxfconf it configured.
> > I would think that a side note for this project would be that the -dev's are
> > required for any missing dependencies.
> 
> Well, it's not specific to the project, it's a Debian thing. As a
> Debian user you need to know that you need to install the -dev
> packages if you're building software.
> Arch Linux, for example, doesn't have "-dev" packages at all. The
> development libs/files are just in the main package.

Arch doesn't split software from upstream into insane different
packages. Debian and Debian based distros (but also RPM based distros
such as Suse)several times suffered from bad library links, since they
not only split headers and the executables, but also libraries needed at
runtime, even in cases when splitting from the bin absolutely makes no
sense, e.g. for jackd. Just for the record, headers don't take that much
disk space. I'm biased, I'm an Arch user. However, assumed a user should
run into issues, because he/she isn't aware about the sick policy of the
distro she/he is using, it's not a task of upstream to mention it. If a
README mentions that for building and/or running some dependencies are
needed, this does mean that you need it from upstream or that you need
to check out yourself what worldview the package maintainer of your
distro have got. That's not the only price users of distros like Debian,
that are far away from the KISS principle have to pay. It's the users
self-responsibility to balance pros and cons regarding to the needs, IOW
to read the information that is given. To be fair IOW don't get me
wrong, Debian does inform about it's policy and comes with very good
Wikis. So it's not a bad distro. Bad are only distros that don't provide
Wikis/howtos, mailing lists etc..



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