On 20031206T145904-0600, John Goerzen wrote: > Obviously gcc is the #1 example of this. However, gcc packages should > not need to depend on themselves; in our distribution, we tend to have > many different versions of gcc available, and any of them should be able > to build a newer gcc. Nevertheless, *some* gcc version must build-depend either on itself or on some gcc version that directly or indirectly build-depends on that version. Thus, multiple gcc versions do not fix the circular build-depends problem. > Nothing else in main comes to mind right now, though I'm sure there is > something else... Any self-hosting compiler. We have several. GHC is an example. > But for everything but the C compiler, I think that the build probably > should do the bootstrapping work itself wherever possible. Bootstrapping on every build is not a good idea. For most builds, it's wasted work, since most builds will have a previous version available. Furthermore, any bootstrapping build requires either a bootstrapping compiler (and most languages do not have that in Debian) or distributing a precompiled intermediate form (either C or assembly) that can be further processed at build time to yield a bootstrapping compiler (which IMHO is cheating - it's about as nice as distributing a bootstrapping compiler executable in the source package). -- Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho, Debian developer http://www.iki.fi/gaia/
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