Re: Building Debian Completely From Source
John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> For various reasons [1], I am interested in building Debian from source
> -- and continuing to do so for upgrades and newly-installed packages.
>
> What I'm after is basically something where I can say:
>
> apt-foo install kde
Close enough :) apt-fu -R src-install kde
> The system will then:
>
> 1. Look at kde and build/install any of its build-deps
> 2. Build kde
> 3. Build/install any Depends or Pre-Depends of kde
> 4. Install kde
>
> (These four steps would be repeated for all dependencies that had to be
> filled.)
>
> In other words, at no time would a .deb be downloaded. All .debs would
> be built locally and installed locally.
>
> I'd also like to be able to say:
>
> apt-foo dist-upgrade
apt-fu src-dist-upgrade
Though it takes some configuring.
> Which would essentially run the above steps and upgrade my system.
> Again, no .deb would ever be downloaded; they'd be built and installed
> locally.
>
> We seem to already have the metadata necessary to do this, but as far as
> I can tell, our existing tools don't support it. For instance:
>
> * apt-build has an option to build a package and all packages it
> depends upon, but always downloads binary .debs of -dev packages.
> (Or maybe I got this backwards; I'm not sitting at my apt-build
> machine right now.)
apt-fu installs binary packages of build-depends first to avoid circular
build-dependencies, and then builds and installs the build-depends from
source if -R is specified. It's a nasty problem but you can't have the
chicken without the egg, nor the egg without the chicken.
> * pbuilder and sbuild don't bother with actual installation,
> so they don't resolve dependencies at all. Also, they only download
> .debs of build-deps.
>
> The nearest I have seen is fink, but I know little about it.
>
> Am I missing something? Is anyone working on this?
deb http://www.yhbt.net/normalperson/debian ./
deb-src http://www.yhbt.net/normalperson/debian ./
apt-get install apt-fu
Documentation is available here: http://www.yhbt.net/normalperson/debian/html
I've been meaning to integrate apt-fu features into apt-src and send
patches for a while but I still haven't found the time. Right now,
apt-fu is a combination of ideas from apt-build, apt-src and sbuild. It's
been released for over 2 months now, but I've hardly had any bug
reports. It works fine (albeit slowly) for on both my home machines and
machines at work.
>
> Thanks,
>
> John
>
> [1] I want to experiment with different optimizations on the Alpha...
> plus this would significantly reduce the number of CD's I'd have to
> carry around to have a whole Debian release with me. One binary CD for
> each arch, plus a source CD set that would work for them all.
Maybe you'll see more performance increases with Alpha than I got with
i386 (athlon).
--
Eric Wong normalperson@yhbt.net
Petta Technology, Inc eric@petta-tech.com
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