Re: Pentium Optimized

[Jim Pick <jim@jimpick.com>]

Richard Braakman <dark@xs4all.nl> writes:

> Thomas Ko wrote:
> > But I would like it to be platform independent, so I can take the complete
> > sources, compile the whole distribution on a eg. ix86 and install the whole
> > thing on a powermac or an alpha or whatever.
> 
> Do you mean architecture independent?
> 
> Platform independence would mean Debian packages would build on non-Debian
> systems.  I do not think that is worth pursuing, there are too many 
> broken systems in the world.  Some sort of bootstrap might work, though,
> which gets a basic compilation environment going and little else.

As somebody who had to rebootstrap Debian back in January on ARM
(because of a change in glibc), I can tell you that it's a lot of
work.  It took me about two weeks.  The core packages have a lot of
build-time dependencies on things that aren't bootstrapped until later
in the process (eg. X, jade).  Basically, the only way to bootstrap it
is by manually hacking the core packages to at least get the binaries,
and doing final builds later on.

Bootstrapping the system isn't automated by any stretch of the
imagination.  Maybe it would be a worthwhile thing to do?  It would
probably be a lot of work -- and it isn't necessary to actually
bootstrap the distribution very often.  It would make porting a bit
easier.

> > What needs to be done to give us such a functionality??? - Ease of use,
> > that's what linux needs - 'make world' and the thing rolls.
> 
> The main thing is source dependencies, which means a patch to dpkg.
> The track record for patches to dpkg suggests that your best bet is
> to wait for dpkg2 to become functional.

We've been talking about source dependencies for years.  Someday,
they'll actually get implemented.  :-)

It's a fairly complex issue though.
 
> The next thing is to make sure all packages actually compile from source.
> I don't think we will ever achieve this entirely (there are always bugs),
> but we could do a lot better than we do now.  I expect that the existence
> of such a source-based distribution will do a lot to help.

I'd like to see it.  It would be nice if we could do a complete, clean
build each time before we made a stable release.

Cheers,

 - Jim