From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Andreas Enge Subject: On the annoyance of multiple outputs Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2016 12:27:05 +0200 Message-ID: <20160620102705.GA3648@solar> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:46350) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1bEwQE-0000BI-FE for guix-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 20 Jun 2016 06:27:15 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1bEwQA-0003JB-4j for guix-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 20 Jun 2016 06:27:14 -0400 Received: from mailrelay7.public.one.com ([91.198.169.215]:30690) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1bEwQ9-0003J7-Nl for guix-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 20 Jun 2016 06:27:10 -0400 Content-Disposition: inline List-Id: "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: "Guix-devel" To: guix-devel@gnu.org Hello, commit 6d49ca3bad613700b539c30272e164207455735b in core-updates has added a "bin" output to pcre. This broke the build of swig (corrected later by Ludovic), and it also broke at least the build of 4store. I suggest to revert the first commit. Notice that the bin output contains only the following: -r-xr-xr-x 2 root root 2465 1. Jan 1970 pcre-config -r-xr-xr-x 2 root root 101344 1. Jan 1970 pcregrep -r-xr-xr-x 2 root root 105016 1. Jan 1970 pcretest Apparently pcre-config is used routinely for checking if pcre is available. So the additional output saves little and causes a lot of hassle. I would like to take the opportunity to iterate my skepticism as to the splitting of packages into several outputs. This follows the slippery slope of the Debian style with a regular package and an additional "-dev" package, where by installing just one package (that is, the "out" output), one does not get all of its functionality. This is also surprising and wastes a lot of peoplepower (when seeing the build failure of swig, I did not even guess it could be related to an incomplete pcre package). So in fact, I suggest to unite all of the outputs of pcre into one; the "doc" output is also relatively small: 1792 /gnu/store/c6lrgvva6vzly6ni7f8al9qsdw88hjrf-pcre-8.38-doc 216 /gnu/store/10xwfx7yvbd1mbgm5c78nh1h3sf3l95y-pcre-8.38-bin 3628 /gnu/store/zwc6ck9j0wv80kz5snw5acwb39ws88m1-pcre-8.38 Granted, the doc output takes about a third of the complete package size, but it is still quite moderate absolutely. In my opinion, splitting into several outputs should be limited to cases where the difference is massive (qt-4 being a good example, where the "doc" output contains 277 MB). What do you think? Andreas