Re: Autocompilation and source dependencies

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

On 29 Oct 1998, Brederlow wrote:

> We (Falk hueffner and me) have started to do some real autocompilation
> programm/script. Source dependencies should be determined by the prog
> itself and then stuffed somewhere into the package.
> 
> [...]

Great!

I would just like to comment about this:

> - The build will usually fail, because the basic tools are not
>   installed. Its probably a good idea to install a set of tools by
>   default and have a look at the dependencie output later to see if they 
>   are used at all. Once a package was build correctly, only the needed
>   packages will be installed.

I think that this leads to the idea of a "base system" or
"source-essential-packages" for building.

We talked about this some time ago in debian-policy. I would advocate for
making the base system as *little* as possible, so that we do not "lose"
any valuable information.

For example, if a binary package depends on libc6, clearly the source
package needs (almost always) a C compiler, libc6-dev, binutils, and make.

We will not lose many information if we drop that from the source-depends
field (the day we have a source-depends field).

I consider useful information however, that a package needs bison, flex,
libstdc++2.x, automake, or autoconf for building, even if many of those
tools have Priority: standard or higher, and therefore I think these
tools should not be part of the "source-base" set of packages.

-- 
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