Re: Pentium Optimized
Jim Pick <jim@jimpick.com> writes:
> Richard Braakman <dark@xs4all.nl> writes:
>
> > Thomas Ko wrote:
> > > But I would like it to be platform independent, so I can take the complete
> > > sources, compile the whole distribution on a eg. ix86 and install the whole
> > > thing on a powermac or an alpha or whatever.
> >
> > Do you mean architecture independent?
> >
> > Platform independence would mean Debian packages would build on non-Debian
> > systems. I do not think that is worth pursuing, there are too many
> > broken systems in the world. Some sort of bootstrap might work, though,
> > which gets a basic compilation environment going and little else.
>
> As somebody who had to rebootstrap Debian back in January on ARM
> (because of a change in glibc), I can tell you that it's a lot of
> work. It took me about two weeks. The core packages have a lot of
> build-time dependencies on things that aren't bootstrapped until later
> in the process (eg. X, jade). Basically, the only way to bootstrap it
> is by manually hacking the core packages to at least get the binaries,
> and doing final builds later on.
Thats a problem of missing source dependencies. If we had those on all
packages, it would be trivial to spot those deadlock. Then they could
be solved by splitting up packages.
> Bootstrapping the system isn't automated by any stretch of the
> imagination. Maybe it would be a worthwhile thing to do? It would
> probably be a lot of work -- and it isn't necessary to actually
> bootstrap the distribution very often. It would make porting a bit
> easier.
Its only needed once, unless you crash the system.
> > The next thing is to make sure all packages actually compile from source.
> > I don't think we will ever achieve this entirely (there are always bugs),
> > but we could do a lot better than we do now. I expect that the existence
> > of such a source-based distribution will do a lot to help.
>
> I'd like to see it. It would be nice if we could do a complete, clean
> build each time before we made a stable release.
Thats the reason why one should not upload binraies, but let the
autobuilders cope with the package, even on once own arch. Its a good
test to see if the package compiles on a fairly clean system.
MfG,
Goswin
Reply to: