David Weinehall wrote:
It would be a neat trick, but I'm finding that the hard part for me in using debs is keeping my own source code changes integrated. Also, there is a lot of overhead building stuff that I just don't care about.
I build debs of my own source code too, to be able to keep track of dependencies in a sane manner.
How do you keep track of the patches you make for them, so that you can keep your deb up to date with the real deb?
In other words, it seems like a good way of making "a smaller Debian", but not quite for smaller, more heavily modified embedded systems.
Well, this is after all debian-embedded...
I like Debian a lot, but I like it because it's the right tool for the job. I think some bits of it are unsuited to systems that may require local modification - putting the entire patch in one file, for instance. That doesn't even work for big debs (gcc, glibc), which have their own hacky system of dealing with a series of smaller patches. Also, consider build time, if you want to be able to recreate everything from sources, all the time spent on packages such as gcc-docs is wasted.
I'm even getting skeptical about building from Debian sources given how some of them behave - glibc doesn't actually give you the real sources it's using until you issue a command in ./debian/rules. Automating that sort of thing is no fun.
-- David N. Welton davidw@eidetix.com