It’s time for the maintainers of a Linux distribution to give serious thought to dropping “developers’” packages once and for all.
Back In The Days, when processor speeds were a few tens of megahertz, hard disk sizes were a few hundred megabytes and Internet connections were by dial-up, there was a genuine need to conserve CPU cycles and disk space. So the fledgling Linux distributions provided pre-compiled binary packages containing only files essential for day-to-day running. If you wanted to compile another package yourself from Source Code to work with an existing package, you had to download a separate developer’s package. If you were playing about with Linux at all, you generally knew what you were doing.
That made perfect sense in that environment.