Re: ARMv4-support in armel/squeeze?
* Konstantinos Margaritis (markos@genesi-usa.com) [101220 23:04]:
> a. identify all the circural dependencies in the package tree
> (probably something ilke that is already done using some tool)
> b. Modify some packages to actually separate into 2 _source_ packages,
> a -core and a -full. The -core could be built with only minimal
> functionality and just enable the needed package to build.
I doubt that you get enough buy-in from the maintainers to do that.
I suggest a different way: Add a new "bootstrap mode" to the build
utilities (as per DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS='bootstrap=yes'), in which a
source package can be built even if packages marked as not relevant
for the architecture "bootstrap" are not there. Also, not all binary
packages of the source package need to be produced, but the packages
which are produced need to be technical functional (but might be
without documentation, and with an degraded user interface). (Also,
these binary packages are marked with Bootstrap: yes, to be able to
identify them.)
(Basically, that adds Build-Recommends, in addition to Build-Depends.)
As an example, take bash:
Package: bash
Binary: bash, bash-static, bash-builtins, bash-doc, bashdb
Build-Depends: autoconf, autotools-dev, patch, bison, libncurses5-dev [!bootstrap], texinfo [!bootstrap], debhelper (>= 5), texi2html [!bootstrap], locales, gettext, sharutils, time, xz-utils
Build-Depends-Indep: texlive-latex-base [!bootstrap], ghostscript [!bootstrap]
This has the advantage that it doesn't require duplicating source
packages, and the changes required to an package are not that
difficult usually.
> Also, It should be a fix in the policy that NO package should ever be
> allowed to have circular dependecies. Without a change in the policy
> the problem will never be fixed.
That's not possible. There is a minimal set of packages
build-depending on themselfs - but we should try to keep that set as
minimal as possible.
Andi
Reply to: