Re: Building a distribution from source?

[Steve Kemp <skx@debian.org>]

On Thu, Dec 11, 2003 at 12:10:06PM +1100, Russell Coker wrote:

> Let me know when you have an apt repository that's in a usable state and I'll 
> recommend it on my SE Linux web pages.  I expect that anyone who is 
> interested in SE Linux will be interested in your work as well.

  This work has hit a snag with dependencies which I've currently hacked
 around.

  I want to use a patched compiler, so that's the thing that I started
 with.  I was a little optomistic originally as I was working on
 unstable.

  On stable there are two main approaches:

  	* Patch gcc-2.95 with the SSP code.
	* Backport gcc-3.3 with the SSP code already included.

  So far I've been going down the second course, getting the latest
 Debian unstable package and hacking it to build on stable (strange
 issues with internal compiler errors when building the pascal code,
 and issues with building the -doc package).

  Once those problems were resolved getting gcc-3.3 built on Debian 
 stable was fairly trivial, just time consuming. 
 (8 hours from start of compile to finish was my fastest recorded
 time!)

  After that there are dependencies to be followed before it can be
 installed, I'm unsure if I can ignore them so far:

  gcc-3.3: Depends: binutils (>= 2.13.90.0.10) but 2.12.90.0.1-4 is installed
  libstdc++5-3.3-dev: Depends: libc6-dev (>= 2.3.1) but 2.2.5-11.5 is installed
 
  binutils is a simple one to build, only relying upon Debian stable,
 and a more recent modutils.

  modutils was simple to build, just requiring the new package
 "dpatch".

  After that the last dependencei is the libc6-dev package - getting
 v2.3.1 built on Debian stable appears to be involved.

  I have currently patched my UML image such that although libc6,
 libc6-dev and locales all are 2.5.5-11.5 they appear as 2.3.1, this
 satisfies the dependencies and allows things to proceed - but it's
 clearly the wrong solution.

  So .. progress is happening and I have a couple more routes to
 explore:

    1.  Telling libstdc++ that it can get by on an older libc
    2.  Abandoning this approach and getting the SSP code running on
       gcc-2.95

  I have the packages I've built, but until I solve the libc problem
 they are not fit to be distributed.

  I'll keep updating the new pages:

  	http://www.shellcode.org/Cat/

Steve
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