Re: [Conclusion] Subversion 1.3 distribution tar slimmer?

On 9/1/05, Ben Collins-Sussman <sussman@collab.net> wrote:
> The vocal minority, in this case, seems to be a group of people who
> are not packagers, but for some reason (either because they use an
> obscure OS, or choose to ignore existing binary packages) build every
> release from tarball. I still don't understand why this change would
> be more than a one-time inconvenience for such people. The first
> time they build from tarball, they need to fetch dependencies.
> Everytime thereafter, the dependencies are already installed.

It may be a one-time inconvenience to install dependencies, but it's a
large inconvenience if you work with a system that does not have
binary packages for the Subversion dependencies. On the systems I work
with, I am not a root user, so I am unable to install binary packages.

Because Subversion releases ship with many of its dependencies,
Subversion is refreshingly easy to install.

I don't think would be a good idea to just "stop shipping
dependencies". Why get rid of a great feature, that makes Subversion
much easier to configure and install, just so that we can have a
smaller download?

We can accomplish the same goal without causing users pain by
splitting Subversion into two packages:
1. Subversion Core
2. Subversion Dependencies
- apr
- apr-util
- neon

If you want a quick download, you can just download the Subversion
Core. If you find out you're missing dependencies, you can download
the "Subversion Dependencies" package. Either way, you'll never have
to complete more than two steps to install a Subversion release.

Cheers,

David

-- 
David James -- http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~james
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