Re: Data does NOT belong in Debian (was: Stop Archive bloat)
On Wed, 20 Oct 1999 14:06:50 +1000, Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> wrote:
>On Tue, Oct 19, 1999 at 11:00:14PM +0200, Torsten Landschoff wrote:
>> On Tue, Oct 19, 1999 at 09:43:57PM +0200, Goswin Brederlow wrote:
>> > Why not allow Source only packages ?
>> That will win nothing. You can't use apt-get on them, have to rebuilt=20
>> and have them twice locally.=20
>
>$ apt-get source -b foo # to get source and build
>
>There isn't a `get source, build and install' option afaik; and
>build-depends aren't implemented yet; but still.
For "pure data" packages, per-package build dependencies are mostly
irrelevant--virtually all of them would be satisfied by gunzip, tar,
anything providing /bin/sh, fileutils, and make, and last time I checked
the only package in that list that isn't already Essential is make.
Here's a proposal: Maintainers could have the option of not uploading a
..deb at all if their packages do not have build dependencies other than
the above, and apt could be taught that if it has a deb-src for a binary
package but can't find the binary package itself, it should automatically
try to do 'apt-get source -b' on the sources in a temporary directory
somewhere, then add all such generated .deb files to its sources lists.
For completeness apt would also have to know about removing the .deb files
once they are installed, or for simplicity apt could just remove the .deb
files whenever it does a 'clean'. The sources could be deleted as soon as
the .deb's are generated.
Alternatively, one could define a new rule for debian/rules which,
instead of building a .deb package, builds and installs from sources
directly onto the local system instead. A helper application for dpkg
could take care of the sometimes messy details of updating the package
files database, creating directory structures and moving (not copying
unless there's a cross-device rename happening) files around with all
the necessary error unwinding.
>There's no reason why you can't store just the rebuilt .deb or just
>the source locally, either, afaict.
Build the source package under /var/cache/apt somewhere, and have apt
clean up the mess with 'apt-get clean'.
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