Re: Debian Source distributions (was Re: Intent to package pine-src)
On 7 May 1998, Falk Hueffner wrote:
> Brederlow <goswin.brederlow@student.uni-tuebingen.de> writes:
>
> > It would be a great idea to have source dependencies. I compile all
> > sources on my debian mirror and most fail because of missing
> > files. One then has to search the package and install that before
> > compiling again.
>
> A very simple way to improve in this area would be if it was allowed
> in the policy to add a "Depends:" line to the .dsc file with the same
> format as for .debs. Very easy. Developers probably would start to use
> it, since it makes compiling really much easier for other people. Some
> time in the future this field would probably be made obligatory and
> tools for source extraction could be extended to check them.
>
> Any opionions?
Whithout meaning to sound too negative, I want to caution against such
patch and fill design. Ian J. worked very hard (and was very successful in
my opinion) to design the current source package format to manage the
various problems of absorbing and using upstream sources. We should be
careful to craft any "improvements" to that format in a consistant and
smooth fashion.
That said, I am strongly in favor of a source dependency scheme. It just
needs to be workable.
WRT your suggestion above, I don't think that developers can/should edit
the .dsc file (its check sum is computed by dpkg and provided in the
changes file for dinstall to verify the components).
The correct place for this information is in the control file. This file
has, at least, two paragraphs. One source paragraph, and, at least, one
package paragraph (one for each binary package built from this source).
Currently package depends are placed in the Package paragraph. The logical
place for source depends field is in the Source paragraph. Then
dpkg-buildpackage (and friends) could construct the proper .dsc file
containing the details of the source dependencies.
I see only one problem with source dependencies: How do you tell the
difference between a dependency on a source package and the depencency on
a binary package. I know that most problems are with the need for some
binary program to allow the build to proceed, but sometimes these needs
are for a source file to be present (and in the desired location).
In addition it would be nice if we could come to terms with upstream
source in multiple tarballs (libc6 comes like that as do many others).
There are a number of ways in which the source package format could be
improved, and I agree that source depends are pretty high on that list. I
only wish to caution against trying easy hacks with the distribution
without much more thought and consideration. We should all feel free to
try such ideas out on our own machines just to see how they might work,
but we need much more discusion before actually moving in a particular
direction.
Luck,
Dwarf
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