Re: Increasing regularity of build systems
On Wed, 15 Sep 1999, Paul Slootman wrote:
>
> If all I'm doing is trying fix something, usually just invoking 'make'
> will do it (or some subtle variation that a glance at the rules file
> will make clear). Once it builds, I do 'debian/rules clean' and then
> restart the package build, to ensure that the final package can be
> reproduced (restarting things from the middle sometimes leads to things
> happening differently).
Yes, indeed. Just be thankful you're not a porter for RedHat: with
`rpm', the *only* way to invoke a build that will end up in a binary
package is to invoke a rule with `rm -rf <unpacked sources dir>' as
its first command. Imagine building glibc, where everything works
up until the *very* last file -- so you fix the bug stopping the last
file from building, and you expect to be able to just restart make?
Oh no. You restart the whole *damned* thing. Maybe you're not sure
the fix will work? Prepare to rebuild all of glibc 20 times.
Yes, you can edit the build script not to `rm -rf', but if you do,
odd files tend not to get properly included in the rpm archive.
However, this has been a preferable alternative to rebuilding for
another 36 hours. (I could go on. RPM is shit, for porters at least.)
--
Chris <chris@fluff.org> ( http://www.fluff.org/chris )
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