On Wed, Sep 01, 1999 at 07:44:45AM -0400, Dale Scheetz wrote:
> Consider a fundamental core program like make. Currently make will not
> build without texi2html, which comes from the tetex-bin package.
>
> Now, let us assume (probably not the case, but I need a scenerio) that
> tetex-bin uses autoconf to build the source, and depends on a new feature
> from the latest autoconf; but building autoconf requires the newest
> version of make, which can't be built without texi2html.
In some cases, you probably have no choice but to do them by hand. A trivial
circular dependency is that gcc compiles with gcc, by default. Expecting
an autobuilder to not have to worry about that is probably a little bit
more than we expect just yet.
However, I wonder if being able to tell debian/rules to "build everything
you can, but don't worry if you (a) miss a package or (b) don't have any
docs or multilingual support or stripped binaries or...". An autobuilder
could try breaking any dependency chains at each point and installing
the half-built packages until it can build real ones.
I'm not sure how hard this would be to do, though. But it does sound
like a Neat Idea(tm), for what that's worth...
Ummm...
ObBug: 43842 (okay, it's about as far from `release critical' as you can
get (ie, wishlist, and forwarded upstream), but it's y2k
related, so that ought to count for something, right?)
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. PGP encrypted mail preferred.
``The thing is: trying to be too generic is EVIL. It's stupid, it
results in slower code, and it results in more bugs.''
-- Linus Torvalds
Attachment:
pgpAAqbmVglPk.pgp
Description: PGP signature