[Nix-dev] Re: Boost libraries

[Peter Simons]

Hi Eelco,

 > I really don't want all those variants back in the default build,
 > because it's crazy to have a simple support library take up a quarter
 > of a gigabyte.

well, I see what you mean. 258 MB is a lot of disk space for something
that you don't need, but I happen to need those libraries pretty much
every day in pretty much every program I write, so when I hear that the
installed package requires 258 MB, I just shrug. That disk space costs
less than 1 Euro.


 > Then we definitely need to do it through a flag, which is easy to do.

Yeah, that would be fine.


 >> It feels odd that version 1.36.0 is still available, but (the newer)
 >> version 1.37.0 is not. What exactly does it mean for a package like
 >> Boost to be "unused"?
 >
 > It's not referenced anywhere in Nixpkgs. 1.36.0 is still used by
 > OpenOffice.

For me personally, the removal of 1.37.0 is not a problem, so I don't
care much about the issue, really, but still I'd like to point out that
developer packages like Boost can very well be "in use" by users of Nix
without being referenced as a dependency in nix-pkgs. For example, Nix
itself does depend on Boost, although the author has chosen to make that
dependency implicit instead of making it explicit. ;-)

Take care,
Peter