Re: Building Debian Completely From Source

[Roger Leigh <roger@whinlatter.uklinux.net>]

John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> writes:

>> apt-fu installs binary packages of build-depends first to avoid circular
>> build-dependencies, and then builds and installs the build-depends from
>> source if -R is specified.  It's a nasty problem but you can't have the
>> chicken without the egg, nor the egg without the chicken.
>
> Yeah, I have found some of those circular build-deps.  I believe they
> should be considered serious bugs if they aren't already.  That's just
> wrong.  But in my case, I'd rather deal with the breakage manually than
> download the .deb.

In late 2001, I spent several weekends hand-building quite a large
chunk of woody (over 200 source packages).  I found quite a number of
serious bug in several packages, including missing Build-Deps, and, in
the case of (IIRC) Tcl 8.x, it wouldn't build unless the same version
was also installed (due to a shlibs problem requiring the just-built
library to be installed for shlibdeps to be computed).

This sort of automated source building is a very good idea--it will
root out a lot of build bugs, and will improve the quality of Debian.


-- 
Roger Leigh

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