On Nov 1, 2003, at 11:43, Scott James Remnant wrote:
Strangely enough, *I* know that.I interpreted his "starting with" as being the set of packages you startbuilding from source.
That's not how I intended it. I'm particularly interested in making backporting from unstable to stable easier; but any other thing --- like bootstrapping new archs --- where you have to rebuild the world would be greatly aided.
And frankly, I don't see why build-essential packages should be special in this way.
For many of the reasons that Essential packages are special. You don't need to list Build-Essential packages in your Build-Depends (generally) for example. And you can't build squat without them.
I can immediately think of several "make replacement" packages (ant, for example) that use themselves to build themselves.
Please read <http://ant.apache.org/manual-1.6beta/install.html#buildingant> where you will learn that Ant does not need Ant to build.