2007/4/28, Travis Willard <travis@archlinux.org>:
There's a problem with stripping stuff needed for build - that "problem" is the AUR. Someone may never expect to need to compile, but then suddenly they realize this really neat or critical app is only available in the AUR - what happens when they set their option to strip away all these files? How do they get them back? This seems like it could be a big hassle.
Neat and/or critical app should ideally be at least in community, not unsupported :) But you could do like in debian, having each lib splitted in foo and foo-dev. Build dep (depends) is foo-dev, which contains the headers and stuff, and runtime dep (makedepends) is foo, which contains only the lib. And yes, it is a big hassle. But if you care about size, it doesn't make sense to ignore that. So people who care should use a distrib that does this split imo. But me, I don't care at all, and want to be able to build packages easily, so I find arch easier to use for that. When you just rebuild a deb, someone already found all the *-dev files for building, so you can install these automatically. But when you want to build a new app, it's often boring to have to track all of them (but worth it, since you only install the -dev packages you need, and don't have a lot of unused ones, which takes a lot of extra space).