Hi, I am writing software that connects to mysql and/or postgres. When i used redhat i was able to install the needed C headers and libs w/o installing the full database on my development machine. The databases are running on a separate test-database server machine, so it's kind of useless to install a full mysql db on the client when it is never used (especially when i install my software to many client machines). I'd like to suggest a standard way of installing client only libs for databases or other software that has a client and server part (e.g. subversion). It could be a new USE flag called 'clientonly' or something similar. USE="clientonly perl python" emerge mysql would install just the client libs and language bindings for perl and python to connect to mysql databases. What do you think about that? I think it is quite useful especially when a company has many client machines that need access to a db server... I haven't found a way how to build "client libs only" on gentoo, maybe i missed something obvious or documented - if so please tell me. thanks in advance for your thoughts HTD Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
i have as the sole maintainer on mysql in the past (thankfully i have help these days, bases are more covered, finally...) flat-out rejected this because there are surely tonnes of ebuilds this schema can be applied to. further, it makes no sense to stop with clientonly. what about -doc, -devel, -lib, -server, -client, etc, etc, etc. further, making this into a USE flag is complete nonsense as USE flags are for OPTIONAL BUILD-TIME FUNCTIONALITY, they are not meant as an arbitrary way to carve up a package into subpackages. Sorry, bubba, but you really havent put hardly ANY thought into this at all. However, I think your END GOAL is noble and worthy. Why not start a crusade to have subpackages support in portage properly? Then all the ebuilds in the tree could start defining subpackages, dependencies could be updated to depend on subpackage components, etc.
First of all - the clientonly flag idea is not from me, its origin is from a discussion about client only features for subversion (see http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20842#c1) and came from Patrick Kursawe, and he seems to be quite involved in gentoo. At that time i didn't know that there's no sub-package support in gentoo and i was told that using that extra flag could be a way of solving it. That's why i reused that idea for the database server ebuilds... You are right that this shouldn't stop at "client only" packages and it's a bad idea to add this feature to the use-flags. So it's time to start a crusade for subpackage support in portage, as you said... If someone could please close that bug? I'm going to rephrase the issue to a request for subpackages and file a new "bug", if that request doesn't exist already.
Post the new bug # here once you have created it, and I will close this bug then (I'm just doing this to keep track of the overall issue).
ok, here you go: it's bug #22219
Closing as per user request. See the new bug instead. #22219.
