[techtalk] ICU troubles

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Fri, Feb 18, 2000 at 10:59:17AM -0800 or thereabouts, Lighthouse Keeper in the Desert Sun wrote:

> Maybe I need gnome-core-devel.  THat is the only one it wants...  (This is
> a big pain in my arse, you know?  My modem freezes and stalls a lot after
> a couple hundred K, and I'm using a 28K dialup.  *sigh*  Living out of
> range for decent DSL and not having any other high-speed options sucks.)

I really sympathise. In part, this is the point of the -devel rpms, 
I think.

> So, why do programs need development libraries sometimes?  The reason I
> don't usually bother to get devel-libraries is because I'm not a
> developer.  I'm not a programmer, I don't know any programming languages
> (though I'm working on larning my 3rd natural human language).  But then I
> try to install a new program that needs them.  I don't get it.

OK. I think the theory goes that there are plenty of people who are
never going to need to build or compile their own programs. These are
the people who tend not to use unstable code, and who just run Linux 
out of the box and get a bunch of upgrades as they are announced as
ready for general use. Or you can find yourself in the situation where
you have a machine which is too small to fit both X and compilers on.
I have been in this more than once. :) Since there are other machines
around here which I can use to compile, I tend to drop the compiler 
and put on X. Whatever the reason, there's people who won't want or 
need the sources, just a binary they can drop in.

The tarballs for gnome-core and gnome-libs and what-have-you have
loads and _loads_ of stuff in them. Lots of it is only necessary for
people who are going to build other programs which depend on gnome-core
or gnome-libs (etc).

You can have a src.rpm, which has the lot. But for people grabbing
the binaries, they are split into some-package.rpm and 
some-package-devel.rpm. If you're only ever going to put binary
rpms on, then you won't need the devel ones and you won't need to
spend hours downloading. 

For reference, for people who doubt this necessity: I grabbed October 
Gnome, the most recent co-ordinated release, in the middle of the night 
as a cron job from a mirror. I got it all, including the devel stuff. It
took about five hours to download the lot on my 28.8 kb modem. I can't
get a faster connection. DSL is being trialled near London, but not in 
Wales, and cablemodem has been promised "in six months" for the last 
three years. 

If you look at the BBC report on net costs,
(http://http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/uk/newsid_644000/644839.stm)
you'll see that the UK is the sixth-most expensive country for net 
access and we are charged by the time we spend online. I used to reckon
a pound per hour online -- for the phone bill. 

Had I not wanted the -devel stuff since I knew perfectly well I would
be building other things against it, I could have halved that time
(and cost, except that I am lucky and we do actually have a most
unusual flat-rate deal).

I'm told that less bandwidth is not actually the major reason for
the package/package-devel split: it's much more for the people who
simply won't ever want or need to build new things and will only
be getting the occasional (binary) RPM when security updates come
out (if that, ahem). They just don't need any of the devel stuff.

I don't know whether the other RPM-using distributions make this
distinction between package and package-devel. But it is really really
useful, both for small machines where you are not going to build and
you have disk issues; and for crappy connections where you're paying
per minute.

Telsa

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