On Wed, Sep 01, 1999 at 07:44:45AM -0400, Dale Scheetz wrote: > Consider a fundamental core program like make. Currently make will not > build without texi2html, which comes from the tetex-bin package. > > Now, let us assume (probably not the case, but I need a scenerio) that > tetex-bin uses autoconf to build the source, and depends on a new feature > from the latest autoconf; but building autoconf requires the newest > version of make, which can't be built without texi2html. In some cases, you probably have no choice but to do them by hand. A trivial circular dependency is that gcc compiles with gcc, by default. Expecting an autobuilder to not have to worry about that is probably a little bit more than we expect just yet. However, I wonder if being able to tell debian/rules to "build everything you can, but don't worry if you (a) miss a package or (b) don't have any docs or multilingual support or stripped binaries or...". An autobuilder could try breaking any dependency chains at each point and installing the half-built packages until it can build real ones. I'm not sure how hard this would be to do, though. But it does sound like a Neat Idea(tm), for what that's worth... Ummm... ObBug: 43842 (okay, it's about as far from `release critical' as you can get (ie, wishlist, and forwarded upstream), but it's y2k related, so that ought to count for something, right?) Cheers, aj -- Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/> I don't speak for anyone save myself. PGP encrypted mail preferred. ``The thing is: trying to be too generic is EVIL. It's stupid, it results in slower code, and it results in more bugs.'' -- Linus Torvalds
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