[maemo-developers] External Repository and HAM

[From: Simon Pickering]

> Marius Vollmer wrote:
> >To be fair, libraries do not _need_ to be shared, sharing them is an
> >optimization.
> 
> True, but this is very inefficient on small-memory devices. It makes a
> huge difference to have, say, 3 applications sharing a library instead
> of having 3 copies in memory instead.

And it's also rather a waste of the developers' time if someone has
already gone to the effort of Debianising/getting it to work in general.

> How to resolve this? Ideally, library K should now be taken over by
> some maintainer (who could be one of the two mentioned, or someone
> else), but this time built as a universal library with all features
> enabled, useful for all developers.  The good thing about a shared
> repo here is that at least the issue comes to a head quickly. Do we
> have procedures for handling this?

Is this actually a problem? I've done this a fair few times, either had
someone ask me if I'd recompile something with different configure
options, or said the same to someone else. 

I don't see much point in building with all options until/unless they
are needed as you increase the effort/build time/probably the installed
size/etc. 

I've got to say I find this a real annoyance when "porting" Debian
packages that include every possible combination of external libs in
their requirements (recursively), when not many of them are probably
necessary for what I want and it means I need to get even more support
libs working (and when I'm thinking of FORTRAN apps here, that's often
actually a real pita).

Cheers,


Simon