Re: equivalent of *BSD's 'make world' in debian?

[Daniel Burrows <Daniel_Burrows@brown.edu>]

On Thu, Nov 04, 1999 at 02:35:42PM +0100, Jens Ritter was heard to say:
> Daniel Burrows <Daniel_Burrows@brown.edu> writes:
> 
> >   There's actually yet another problem: next time you do apt-get upgrade, apt
> > will recognize that the md5sum of your local package doesn't match the one on
> > the ftp server and kindly clobber your changes!  I think that until it marks
> > packages built locally from source as such this isn't going to be feasable on
> > a large scale.
> 
> Well you can bumb the versions in debian/changelog, so this does not
> happen.  In addition what use is it to say apt-get upgrade on such a
> system (where everything is e.g. pentium optimized)?
> You will have to parse the output of apt-get upgrade, but then you're
> done with it. 
> 
> Jens

  Yes, I know..but this doesn't work so well for building large numbers of
packages.  A really simple (and Evil[tm]) hack would be for apt to put an epoch
in front of source-built packages.  A better one would be to add a status flag
indicating that a package was built from source; apt-get upgrade would then
download a new source package and build it instead of downloading a binary
package, and would ignore md5sum mismatches between the local package and
the ftp archive version.  This is probably a pie-in-the-sky idea, though.. :-/

  As to why you'd do apt-get upgrade..I suspect that few people will want to
pentium-optimize absolutely *everything*; for most programs, in fact, it will
probably not make much of a difference (most programs spend most of their time
waiting for IO, I believe)  Maybe some core libraries and heavily CPU-dependent
code (POVray, mesagl, and terraform for example) would be recompiled, but
there's no real reason to have, say, a Pentium-optimized mutt or w3m; it's just
an extra hassle to recompile them with no gain, except maybe that you can
say "look, I have a completely Pentium-optimized system!"

  Daniel

-- 
"I can see that you are clearly a much better swordsman than I am!"
"Then why are you smiling?"
"Because I know something you don't know."
"And what is that?"
"I am not left-handed."
  -- "The Princess Bride"