Re: portability as a goal for debian?
On Tue, Mar 06, 2001 at 06:24:52PM +0100, Andreas Schuldei wrote:
> While working on the OpenBSD port of debian I notice several
> spots in the debian package infrastructure which are not portable
> accross unices. These are mostly gnuisms of make, but also in the
> gnu file utilitys.
Ash uses pmake. So I have to port pmake to the Hurd, although I would rather
stick with GNU make. The build dependencies are up to the upstream
software most of the time anyway, and almost every Debian package has so
rich build dependencies (up to XFree86) that depending on the GNU tools is
not a problem.
> Other problems arise when in the packages
> linux as a platform is assumed, ignoring everything else and not
> checking (in configure) if this really the case.
This is serious. I have fixed many of these for the Hurd port, for example
perl. You should be able to port all with priority standard or higher
without too much work. From there, I have not come very far yet (X, TeX,
okay. But there is much more :)
> I would like to see portability an aim for debian (tools, package
> infrastructure, ?) defined in policy.
I would rather see a way to specify how portable a package is first.
Note that we have a serious limitation on our architecture field right now.
Most maintainers are happy to receive patches, but removing the dependencies
on the GNU tools is probably stretching it. Note that you must have GNU make
and other tools for some software to compile, so it doesn't make much sense
to remove this option consequently.
Marcus
--
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de
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