I disagree. There are good reasons to have -devel packages these days, and one of them is still disk space.
Careful usage of disk space is very helpful when you're maintaining a farm of virtual machines on shared storage. If your virtual machine is only going to serve DNS, why force it to have lots of files that it doesn't need, and use up space that would be better allocated to other machines?
You suggested deleting files after installing packages to keep things trimmed down, but doing so defeats the point of using a package manager. If I were going to monkey around with the files after installing the packages, I might as well not use a package manager at all. Another argument against trimming files also comes from the virtual machine farm: files to be trimmed do have to be installed during kickstart, making kickstart slower and requiring the virtual disk to be big enough to store the files just long enough for me to delete them. Since, at least with VMware ESX 2.5 and VMFS 2, it's not trivial to shrink drive images, I'm left with wasted space, not to mention wasted time.
Changing files behind RPM's back actually breaks useful functionality. For example, if a piece of software is giving me trouble, I can ask RPM to verify that it's properly installed, but if I've gone and deliberately removed some of its files, of course it'll look like the package is broken. Aside from that, what happens when I do a system update? I'd have to make package trimming an extra step for myself every time. I manage thousands of Linux boxes as part of my work; if I had to do this sort of package trimming I'd go insane.
I have to agree with you. I cringed when they brought up the example of the CD stack--immediately, I thought, "but I have 800 CDs!" Pretty much all of the UI usability experts warn against making interfaces that imitate real-world devices, and this is probably one of the best (worst?) examples of that rule's violation.
So far, nobody I've talked to about Looking Glass can give me a genuinely good reason that turning everything into a 3D object is a useful thing to do. Can anyone here convince me?
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I disagree. There are good reasons to have -devel packages these days, and one of them is still disk space.
Careful usage of disk space is very helpful when you're maintaining a farm of virtual machines on shared storage. If your virtual machine is only going to serve DNS, why force it to have lots of files that it doesn't need, and use up space that would be better allocated to other machines?
You suggested deleting files after installing packages to keep things trimmed down, but doing so defeats the point of using a package manager. If I were going to monkey around with the files after installing the packages, I might as well not use a package manager at all. Another argument against trimming files also comes from the virtual machine farm: files to be trimmed do have to be installed during kickstart, making kickstart slower and requiring the virtual disk to be big enough to store the files just long enough for me to delete them. Since, at least with VMware ESX 2.5 and VMFS 2, it's not trivial to shrink drive images, I'm left with wasted space, not to mention wasted time.
Changing files behind RPM's back actually breaks useful functionality. For example, if a piece of software is giving me trouble, I can ask RPM to verify that it's properly installed, but if I've gone and deliberately removed some of its files, of course it'll look like the package is broken. Aside from that, what happens when I do a system update? I'd have to make package trimming an extra step for myself every time. I manage thousands of Linux boxes as part of my work; if I had to do this sort of package trimming I'd go insane.
-lars
I have to agree with you. I cringed when they brought up the example of the CD stack--immediately, I thought, "but I have 800 CDs!" Pretty much all of the UI usability experts warn against making interfaces that imitate real-world devices, and this is probably one of the best (worst?) examples of that rule's violation.
So far, nobody I've talked to about Looking Glass can give me a genuinely good reason that turning everything into a 3D object is a useful thing to do. Can anyone here convince me?
Richard Gooch published an interesting implementation of parallel init scripts almost a year ago: http://www.atnf.csiro.au/people/rgooch/linux/boot- scripts