Re: Debian-Alpha port ideas...please read (long)
On Thursday, 30 Oct, Christopher C Chimelis wrote:
>
> I'm beginning to agree. We need to get these "g" libs compiled, and
> there is no doubt that we can do it, but I'm worried about breaking the
> things that we may not have patches for (example only, I have no patches
> for gdb, ldso, and quite a few others).
Excuse me for deviating from the topic, but what's this ldso you keep
mentioning? Ldso is obsoleted by glibc (I mean, glibc provides all its
functionality). We don't need it on Alpha, do we?
> The Provides idea is pretty sound
> on our platform, though. It's an interesting thought. I'll have to try
> it with a few packages to see how well it works.
Umm... The implementations of both approaches (stripping "g" and
employing Provides:) are almost identical, the main idea being to
generate the control file from something like control.in with variable
substitutions, performing architecture dependent variable initialisation
in the rules file. There is no significant difference in which field is
going to be patched, Package: or Provides:. (At least I don't see any
at the moment, leaving aside -p options to dpkg-gencontrol and similar
small things.)
We must consider the following.
1. Aesthetical reasons:
- it may be nice to keep the package naming on Alpha as close as
possible to other platforms (I believe it is pure aesthetics);
- from the other hand, "g" looks ugly;
- with "Provides:", for each "g" package there will be one ghost
package sitting in the packages database until the transition is
over.
2. "Provides:" is obviously a temporary measure which should go away as
soon as all dependencies are correct. Our grandchildren will eventually
clean up the corresponding mess in debian/rules, if we happen to be firm
enough to insist and they do not forget. Renaming packages is kind of a
"permanent damage" to debian/rules, which, however, doesn't impose any
obligations on our grandchildren.
Any other thoughts?
Nikita
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