Re: dpkg enhancements
Hi!
On Thu, 27 Nov 1997, Andreas Jellinghaus wrote:
> > This has already been discussed some time ago. The problem with changing
> > the order is that you risk that the build process is not reproducable
> > since you are not assured that you compiled in a clean environment.
>
> but in many cases i know, that my change will not have an effect on
> reproducability (like a typo in the second last line of debian/rules
> binary-i386 section). in this case, it would be a vaste of time, to
> compile everything again. so i suggest to add a flag to give developers
> the choice to use the different order.
By performing the build process as usual (clean, create source package,
build, create binary binary) we are getting reproducable binary packages.
Thus, the extra time for doing the whole procedure again is not
wasted--it's needed to assure that everyone else who downloads the source
package and compiles it gets the same binary package (provided that he has
the same packages installed as you had before--that's why we need source
dependencies).
Everyone that has knowledge in configuration management and quality
assurance will agree with me that one cannot rely on a statement like
`this change will not affect reproducability.' The reason for this is the
complexity of software development, definitely not because I think we are
incompetent.
BTW, Roman has given an excellent example: He said `often errors only show
up when finally assembling the .deb'. In other words, some errors only
show up when you recompile everything in a clean environment.
(I know this from my own experience: The mysql package takes about 30
minutes to compile on my system. That's a long time to discover one minor
mistake in debian/rules. However, the source packages is quite complex
since a lot of files are actually changed within the build procedure.
It's hard to predict the causes of a small change in debian/rules or any
similar file.)
Anyways, it's the computers time that's `wasted,' not yours. Just develop
and test your packages with a simplified procedure. If you think that
everything is in place you can run the usual dpkg-buildpackage. If you
really didn't forget about some consequences, the build process should run
without your interaction, so you don't `waste' any time. If user
interaction is necessary (i.e., something has been forgotten) then it's
probably less time consuming to fix it and recompile it than to receive a
bug report a few days later saying that the source package does not
compile...
Thanks,
Chris
-- Christian Schwarz
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