Charlie Brady wrote: > > On Mon, 1 Aug 2005, Matthew Miller wrote: > >> On Sun, Jul 31, 2005 at 10:18:21PM -0400, Charlie Brady wrote: >> >>>>> I've already tried and failed to convince RedHat that their >>>>> pattern of >>>>> having xxx-devel packages require xxx is wrong. >>>> >>>> Often they actually do, though. >>> >>> Would you care to explain, or give an example? >> >> >> Try to build an SDL program with SDL-devel installed but not SDL. > > > All that indicates to me is that there is a bug in the SDL-devel package. > > I haven't tried to build an SDL program, since I don't think it's > necessary for the sake of argument - you can tell us what will happen > if I were to try. Perhaps the problem is that SDL-devel does not > include the libSDL shared library. IMO, shared libraries should be > included in both xxx and xxx-devel packages. AIUI, rpm can handle that > adequately. > Just FYI, the SDL rpm contains ONLY the shared library files and documentation. Those documentation files could very well go into a SDL-doc rpm too. Debian does something like this and they have more deb files per software package than there are rpm files for the same software package in other Linux distributions. They don't lump everything into one deb file or duplicate files across deb files. Your opinion therefore runs contrary to the Linux distribution with the best packaging system available.