Re: Feaping Creature-ism in core Debian Packages
On Thu, Sep 02, 1999 at 11:13:59AM -0400, Dale Scheetz wrote:
> > Are you saying that gcc should be Essential?
>
> Surely not in the quoted sentance ;-)
You suggested that essential packages should be buildable by essential
packages. Now, I took that to mean binary-essential for both instances
of the word "essential". You could have meant that binary-essential
packages must be buildable with build-essential packages. I would
agree with that except on one point: build-essential packages cannot
be built by build-essential packages (assuming 1: gcc requires bison
and 2: bison is not considered build-essential), so the gain would be
very small. In other words, the closure of the set of packages you need
to compile the set of binary-essential packages is not the union of the
two essential package sets, if I may use pseudomathematical jargon ;-)
And I believe the point of your crusade is to minimalize this closure.
> I would consider make, gcc/egcs (i.e. a
> compliant compiler of C code), binutils, to mention a few, as being pretty
> essential to the construction of almost any package.
The following is an excerpt from an accepted policy amendment (Bug#41232)
(the language was written by me, with help from Ian Jackson and some
others):
+ <p>
+ It will not be necessary to explicitly specify build-time
+ relationships on a minimal set of packages that are always
+ needed to compile, link and put in a Debian package a
+ standard "Hello World!" program written in C or C++. The
+ required packages are called <em/build-essential/, and an
+ informational list will be published separately from this
+ document.
+ </p>
So, yes, our definitions seem to be compatible.
--
%%% Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho % gaia@iki.fi % http://www.iki.fi/gaia/ %%%
""
(John Cage)
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