FreeTDS Development Group

[Steve Langasek <vorlon AT netexpress.net>]

Hi Brian,

On Fri, 18 May 2001, Brian Bruns wrote:

> In the past a number of people have submitted RPMs after the tarball
> release was made.  Well this time we're going to do it up right.  I've
> forced myself to learn RPM and I'll be building it at the same time as the
> 0.52 tarball.

> Which leads to my question.  There seems to be two schools on this, a
> simple binary rpm, or one for binaries and a -devel one that has the
> header files and other developer goodies.  Since, FreeTDS is basically
> used by people building things on top of it (PHP, Perl, etc...) and thus
> needs the headers to anything useful anyway, I'm leaning towards option
> one. But, as always, I'm interested in dissenting opinions for why we

> should adopt seperate packages.

I guess FreeTDS is a rather unique library, in that there don't appear to
be any applications that use it which are available in RPM form.  If, say,
sqsh and DBD::Sybase were available as RPMs, I think that'd be a strong
argument for having a separate devel package, since there would then be a lot
of people who don't need the headers & static libraries at that point.  One
could also argue that even if nothing that uses FreeTDS is packaged yet, most
people who use RPM systems are already comfortable with the idea that they
have to download the -dev package when compiling stuff, because they have to
do so for every other library on the planet. :)

It's a non-issue for Debian, in any case; the use of a separate deb package
for headers is mandated by policy. :)  Plus, I'm hoping to get my act together
and package sqsh and the ODBC driver sometime soon.

Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer