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Re: portability as a goal for debian?



On 6 Mar 2001, Sam Hartman wrote:

> >>>>> "Adrian" == Adrian Bunk <bunk@fs.tum.de> writes:
>
>     Adrian> On Tue, 6 Mar 2001, 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. Other problems arise when in the
>     >> packages ...
>
>     Adrian> Please don't try to let the OpenBSD port of Debian work
>     Adrian> without the GNU tools. The GNU tools are portable and I
>     Adrian> don't expect many problems getting them running on
>     Adrian> OpenBSD. And is there a good reason not to use e.g.  GNU
>     Adrian> make?
>
> I don't think the build-depends are such an interesting issue.  GNU
> Make is fairly reasonable to substitute.
>
> It's annoying though to see people save a few keystrokes on calls to
> find and tar so they can avoid specifying -print or use -j or -z.  I
> certainly think that people should be encouraged to submit patches
> that decrease dependence on GNU tools where there is not a good reason for that dependence.
>
> I also think that if we run into maintainers who do not accept these
> patches or disagreements about where such dependence is appropriate,
> discussing changes to policy would be a reasonable solution.
>...

GNU make is build essential. That means I can use it when building a
package without declaring a build dependency.

GNU tar is essential. That means you can assume that it is installed on
every Debian system.

Do you really want to change this?

cu
Adrian

-- 

Nicht weil die Dinge schwierig sind wagen wir sie nicht,
sondern weil wir sie nicht wagen sind sie schwierig.



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