Re: Proposal: New source format (was Re: [Fwd: Re: dpkg question])
On Sun, 11 May 1997, Jim Pick wrote:
> > You might want to unpack a source package for other reasons than
> > to build it -- e.g., I've sometimes searched for documentation. A
> > non-programmer might want to do this so that they can typeset the
> > documentation in LaTeX, instead of printing out the LaTeX2HTML'd
> > version.
>
> The srcpostinst thing was just a trial baloon - I don't think it
> went over very well. So I'll drop that idea. But if we go with
> a source package file format that is the same basic thing as
> what a .deb file is, we can always add it later (if needed).
> I think it's better to unpack the upstream sources in the
> debian/rules makefile anyways (using any tool available on the
> system). I'd oppose having a specialized script file for
> unpacking them, since it's unnecessary -- you can already do
> that from the debian/rules makefile.
This would be better - someone can overlook the debian/rules file first.
> As I said before, I'm quite interested in having a source package
> that automatically unpacks the upstream sources and patches itself
> for the purposes of debugging -- and also can be set to automatically
> build too. This is the equivalent of a "make world". But nobody's
This would be difficult. I always thought that make world was simpler than
this, though - what does is do exactly? (I haven't used any of the *BSD
distributions).
> saying that the system administrator can't have the option of
> just "installing" the source, without running any scripts. This
> should probably be the default behaviour.
Maybe we should limit our support to only certain formats instead of
needing scripts to unpack it - the dpkg end of this could get messy with
pipes or temp. files.
I propose we support zip and the various tar formats only.
> Before I was advocating the use of a separate "sdpkg" program to
> install source packages, but it could probably be done with
> just "dpkg".
>
> ie.
>
> dpkg -i jdk_1.0.2-7.sdeb
>
> Since the extension is .sdeb, dpkg would know that it was a source
> package, and just put it in the appropriate place. Maybe
> /var/lib/dpkg/source/jdk_1.0.2-7 possibly? Since the package
> has dependencies (to .upsdeb's for upstream source, and .deb's for
> binaries needed to build it), those would also need to be installed too.
This should probably be /usr/src/debian. Then we could have a nice set of
Makefiles installed to let us do a "make world" style system. (If I
understand "make world" properly).
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Tom Lees <tom@lpsg.demon.co.uk> http://www.lpsg.demon.co.uk/
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