Re: Graphic support in CVS

["Karim Belabas" <belabas@math.u-bordeaux1.fr>]

* Vincent Lefevre [2006-01-21 19:56]:
>>> Sigh.  No, this means that gd library was present (at least in *some*
>>> form), gd headers were present, but the linking failed...
>>> 
>>>> [ /usr/lib/libgd.so.2 exists, but no /usr/lib/libgd.so link, which would
>>>> require some silly *-dev package to be installed first, I presume. ].
>>> 
>>> I can't deduce any trick which would detect such silly a misconfiguration...
>> 
>> Unfortunately, it's now the default setup in most (all?) Linux distros.
>> I do regret it also, although I can see the original logic for doing so.
> 
> To be able to compile and link against some library, you need both
> the library itself and the header files, which are provided by the
> -dev package (and this is the goal of the -dev package). If headers
> are present, but not the .so file, then there is something broken in
> the library packages.
> 
> The .so file depends on the library API and is not needed to dynamically
> link against the library.

I agree wholeheartedly with the rationale. But in practice, I find myself
hunting and installing -dev packages more often than not (apparently, they
are hardly ever installed by default), so I find the added granularity
(pack + pack-dev) irritating. Esp. when I compare it to the negligible
amount of disk space that was saved by installing only one half of the
pair.

I can certainly live with it. But PARI users stumble on these over and over
again ("readline not found"-kind of problems). Made it a FAQ, but it didn't
help much.

Cheers,

    Karim.
-- 
Karim Belabas                  Tel: (+33) (0)5 40 00 26 17
Universite Bordeaux 1          Fax: (+33) (0)5 40 00 69 50
351, cours de la Liberation    http://www.math.u-bordeaux.fr/~belabas/
F-33405 Talence (France)       http://pari.math.u-bordeaux.fr/  [PARI/GP]