>If you install a library, there is no split between library and header files. There is no zlib-dev package as an addition to zlib. You get everything at once.
And that's good?
And that's good?
seems preferable to accepting arbitrary segmentation of packages into subsets based on some random package maintainers preference..
also, it's not 1993 and having 100kb of headers on my system is not really a big deal.
my point is this is the package maintainer interjecting their own notions of what a package is into what is actually provided by the upstream source. the only 'package X' that is 'correct' w/r/t original author is the one that provides exactly what the source based install provides, anything else is maintainer bias. (which isn't inherently bad; just providing a counterpoint as above claim was questioning)
I don't know about good or bad, but for people like me, it's certainly convenient.