Mark Eichin <eichin@cygnus.com> writes: > Detail: I think "installing" sources is fundamentally wrong. This is > partly aesthetic, but that is derived from large scale systems > experience -- there's the system, and there are the users, and > building packages is a *user* function, not a *system* function. (The > required use of /usr/src/linux for the linux kernel was a mistake > [which was corrected years ago] -- and no, NetBSD is not a > counter-example, the distribution can be rooted elsewhere and is, from > their perspective, *one* build tree.) This is a philosophical difference. I think dpkg could be very useful in user space for "channels" of information, sources, and a whole gamut of other things. See my last post to see how to set it up to work that way. > Now, that leads to the question "how do we know what other sources are > already in place, then?" but see my other suggestion for having > dpkg-source handle source aggregation. (I don't like calling that > "dependency" because it isn't -- prc-tools [an m68k cross compiler and > other stuff for the pilot] *depends* on things like awk and make, but > it *includes* gcc.) I don't think we *need* to know -- we just need > to be able to get them so we can unpack them and do a build. A stone age attitude, if you ask me. I can think of lots of cool, never-attempted-before applications that would benefit greatly from having a consistent set of packaged sources available. > Part of that is because "src.deb" files don't seem to solve a problem > that I actually have. Once the src.deb files is unpacked, I now have > the .tgz and .diff files on disk, sure -- but I *already* have them, > in my local mirror. It looks to me like I'd install the collection of > src.debs, and then dpkg-source -x, err, I mean "make unpack" [they > *are* filling the same slot, right?]... whereas now, I'd just point > some symlinks at my mirror and run dpkg-source -x. You are forgetting that when you run dpkg-source -x, it copies a .orig.tar.gz file to your directory. So there is no difference in disk space used. > Another thought: while this looks somewhat convenient for someone > unpacking the debian sources and building them, it looks a bit > *messier* for those of us who actually produce the packages in the > first place. Well, I'm not exactly sure of that. It's probably more of a "try it, you'll like it" situation. The only thing really missing is a script equivalent to dpkg-source --build, but that would just be a tiny script involving dpkg-deb --build. I think my next step might be to extend this source format so it can be used to build RPM's, as well as .deb's. It's actually not too far off conceptually from the FreeBSD ports collection stuff either. The format could also be enhanced to support better targets, and perhaps the "debugging info in .deb's" thing I was talking about before. Cheers, - Jim
Attachment:
pgpnB9CRqCR4U.pgp
Description: PGP signature