[arch-general] should gawk be in group base-devel?

[Jan de Groot]

On Tue, 2008-06-03 at 18:03 +0300, Roman Kyrylych wrote:
> 2008/6/3 Travis Willard <travis at archlinux.org>:
> > On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 7:05 AM, Neil Darlow <neil at darlow.co.uk> wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> It is often quoted that, for package building purposes, it is assumed a user
> >> has packages in group base-devel installed.
> >
> > Ideally, the user should have BOTH base and base-devel installed for
> > package building.
> 
> +1.
> When user omits any package from base - it's on his/her own risk,
> it is assumed that base is installed on every system,
> so packages from base are not mentioned in (make)depends
> (ok, some cases exists, but they are exceptions from the rule, and
> should had not exist).

I know it's against the policy, but if some program requires a package
from base to work, it should be a dependency. That's why I explicitly
list glibc in packages that link to /lib/libc.so.6 and friends and have
no other dependencies.

For the base/base-devel discussion: when building packages, base-devel
and base should be installed. Looking at debian-alike distributions, I
don't see packages makedepending on g++ either when c++ code needs to be
compiled.