circular dependencies in debian -> impact on emdebian
Hello all,
A few days ago Erik Andersen pointed out some eventual pitfalls for emdebian concerning
the dependencies on our irc channel. (I was a bit slow understanding what he really
meant, but I got his point in the end). As he is the person that has the most experience
with compiling most of debian with another library than glibc, he knows what he is
talking about.
The biggest problem are de pre-depends on documentation tools when building a
package. You just need an awful lot of them.
We thought of several solutions to the problem:
Erik proposed a scheme were we would install a fake-documenation-tools package which
would satisfy all dependencies and send the documentation to /dev/null. As simple as it
sounds to use as hard it seems to me to actually implement this.
Another thought was to add a --nodocs option to ./configure. However this would take
years to settle into all the software. (It is easier to implement however, but you have to
convince quite a lot of developpers )
As I was thinking about it for a longer time, I started to look at the problem in another
way. You only need to satisfy those dependencies on build time, right? So when
cross-compiling if these tools are on the build system the build will run correctly. If you
throw away the docs when building the binary package (which is quite easy) the problem
is solved. (it doesn't even matter if the docs are correctly generated or not, we do not use
them). As we have support for a different control, rules, etc file in the emdebian sub-dir (I
implemented it, it works, but I'm not sure if it is completely functional. Bugs could still
appear) this shouldn't be to hard (we have full control of the build specifics, which
debhelper scripts we will use and of course the dependencies).
Now I would like to know if I have made an error somewhere in my reasoning? Or if
somebody has another solution to the problem.
regards,
Philippe
| Philippe De Swert -GNU/linux - uClinux freak-
|
| Stag developer http://stag.mind.be/
| Emdebian developer: http://www.emdebian.org
|
| Please do not send me documents in a closed format. (*.doc,*.xls,*.ppt)
| Use the open alternatives. (*.pdf,*.ps,*.html,*.txt)
| Why? http://pallieter.is-a-geek.org:7832/~johan/word/english/
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