Re: Source-depends?

[Sven LUTHER <luther@maxime.u-strasbg.fr>]

On Sun, May 23, 1999 at 02:42:51AM +0200, Josip Rodin wrote:
> On Sun, May 23, 1999 at 03:07:19AM +0300, Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho wrote:
> > > Some of these can be detected automatically (#5 could be discovered with a
> > > grep on debian/rules, for example), but some can't.
> > 
> > So, what's the problem?  We don't autodetect all of binary dependencies
> > either.  Maintainers generally know what they need to build their packages;
> > it should be trivial for them to list the dependencies explicitly!
> > 
> > Besides, if source dependencies were completely autodetectable, we wouldn't
> > need them.
> 
> Agreed. We don't need any magic, just a common location for that useful
> piece of information.

I didn't follow all of this thread, but i think source dependencies are mostly
usefull for people recompiling the package.

So it would be nice to have a some kind of wrapper library that patches the
open and such function from glibc, and log the accessed files (the one that are
not in the build directory naturally) after that you just have to run some kind
of dpkg -S on these files, and you get all packages needed for building this
package.

you would need something a bit like what fakeroot does for it, so it is not
impossible.

The dpkg -S part would be quite slow i think, and produce a very big number of
packages, but you could reduce them by providing a standard debian compiler
metapackage (or whatever it is named this days) including stuff like make and
gcc. or maybe various of them for lets say perl-devel, gcc-devel, text-only,
etc, ...

Friendly,

Sven LUTHER