On Sun, 2003-11-02 at 02:48, Anthony DeRobertis wrote: > 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 > > start > > building from source. > > That's not how I intended it. I'm particularly interested in making > backporting from unstable to stable easier; > The only sane definition of "build-recommends" would be that the build won't fail without these packages installed. Your example of texinfo would most certainly cause the build to fail if it could not be found. When backporting, we like to think people doing so have what we call "intelligence" and are able to solve build problems, such as missing deps, themselves. > > 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. > Actually squat is a pure python package, it doesn't use anything from build-essential and can be built easily without them installed. > > 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. > Yes it does, it just happens to include a binary distribution of itself in its own source distribution. Scott -- Have you ever, ever felt like this? Had strange things happen? Are you going round the twist?
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