Re: Feaping Creature-ism in core Debian Packages
Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> The difference between our positions comes from the goals: I
> am focussed totally on the .deb file, and you are emphasizing a port
> or a rebuild situation.
I think you're hit on the exact difference.
> In my eyes, requiring that a build machine be more or less
> full feldged development machine with loads of devel packages is not
> unreasonable, but obviously you do not feel that way.
Dale has merely found out that the first steps of porting debian to a new
architecture is damned hard. There are perhaps 16 people in the world that
really know just how hard: about 2 per port. It's something you only do
once. While it'd be nice if it were easier, I just don't see why it should
be a priority. Even if we did everything Dale wants, porting debian to a new
architecture would still be damned hard.
(I'd really like to hear some of those 20-odd people speak up, BTW.)
> And I can see
> some justification when when thinks of auto builders, since different
> packages may require conflicting packages during the build.
I don't think Dale's arguments hold up here. When we have source
dependancies, these things should be able to be automatically resolved and
the proper packages removed/installed. Unless we have source dependancy
loops. Dale's problems really are outside the scope of source dependancies.
Is gcc's build even self hosting? How about libc? I doubt it. There are
chicken and egg problems all over an intial port.
> This is easy. If you ``use'' or ``require'' any library, you
> have stepped outside the essential package.
With the exception of the one's you'll find if you
"dpkg -L perl-5.005-base |grep \\.pm"
> ======================================================================
> __> cat /var/lib/dpkg/info/perl-base.list
> /.
> /usr
> /usr/doc
> /usr/doc/perl-base
> /usr/doc/perl-base/copyright
> /usr/doc/perl-base/changelog.Debian.gz
> ======================================================================
No, perl-base is just leftover cruft, see above.
> Hence; specfying source dependencies is not so hard.
Yep.
> Are we talking about an initial bootstrap process on a new
> port? That is a fairly uncommon situation. Making things work more
> easily, and thus with less possibility of a bug, for the most common
> case counts for a lot. And Perl does a lot of things easily that one
> has to jump through hoops in shell script.
>
> And we should accept a cross compilation process for new
> ports. That is a one time process, done by one user. If bootstrapping
> a new installation is the issue, I would say that boot strap using
> a cross compiler, or build a system using raw binaries -- not .debs,
> if you have to.
Oh, you did reach the same conclusion I did, way down here. I wholeheartedly
agree.
--
see shy jo
Reply to: