Re: Feaping Creature-ism in core Debian Packages
On Mon, Aug 30, 1999 at 10:36:00AM -0400, Dale Scheetz wrote:
> tetex-bin provides texi2html, so I tried to build tetex-bin: which needs
> flex to be installed, which needs byacc in order to build flex, and byacc
> is built using debhelper. debhelper will not build (I believe because perl
> is not installed...heaven forbid that perl be built with debhelper!), so I
> simply installed the binary-all package.
Welcome to the realm of us porters!
> What to do?
1. Get better cross compilation support into the packages, using
dpkg-architecture. This enables us to bootstrap a system on another,
functional system, where all those helper programs are available.
(This is what I did for the Hurd).
2. Make building packages more flexible. We really need to rethink our rules
file strategy. I believe that we can do better build scripts that are more
fail safe. (Only build parts of a package etc). Maybe something with auto*
tools. This is a lot of work, though.
3. Forget about it. Try to come over the initial bootstrapping process as
fast as possible, as it is very painful. Brute force the rules file ("#" is
your friend).
> So, how do I build only xlib6g from the xfree86 source, without having to
> build the whole package?
Manually. Don't even bother with the Debian packaging issues. Just run "make"
and "make install" or whatever the corresponding commands are. You can run
"make" in the X subdirectories to build only parts of X.
I really like 1. and 2. above, but we have a long way to go, and people are
only interested in this to be able to overcome the need of such a setup
ASAP, this is why not much work is put into this issue. (It's like a party
for people who don't want to vote. It's sole purpose is not to be voted).
Thanks,
Marcus
--
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