Re: Alternative: Source-Centric Approach [w/code]
"Freddie Unpenstein" <fredderic@excite.com> writes:
>> > Your priority are your users, and if Debian has decided to focus
>> > only on some key architectures it would be the best for them to
>> > help them switching to Gentoo instead of hacking Debian to become
>> > some cheap Gentoo clone for most architectures.
>
>> I don't view this as being a cheap Gentoo clone. In fact, I view
>> srcinst as being the Gentoo idea, done right. Gentoo has a lot of
>> problems, especially relating to difficult upgrades. Because of
>> our superior packaging system, we are in a great position to hit
>> the ground running and, with a little help from something like
>> srcinst, come up with something that works -- and works better than
>> Gentoo -- in a short amount of time.
>
> I'm wondering, what happens if you want to install MOST of the deps from source? Wouldn't it be better to have apt-build (using the "official apt algorithms") ask on a dep-by-dep basis whether you want it compiled from source or installed from a binary?
>
> Even better, would be to allow apt's preferences file to state whether a specific package should be installed from binary or source, and have the stock "apt-get install" do what's appropriate. With a few options to set the default mode (binary or source), and to overide the mode for specific packages. And of course, last but not least, apt should keep the package comming from the same source unless specifically changed.
>
>
> Now, if only apt-get understood that a pacakge may be available from more than one mirror at a time...
>
> Fredderic
Which is basically what sourcerer acomplishes in a nice, transparent,
round up fashion (upload pending some spare time).
sourcerer-archive maintains a local archive of selected sources and
packages from various sources (debian mirrors or incoming
queue). E.g. mirror all installed packages and sources.
sourcerer-watcher watches for apt activity and can update the
selection of sourcerer-archive automatically. On "apt-get install
foobar" foobar gets added to the package list, on purge it gets
removed.
sourcerer-buildd finaly builds selected packages from the archive and
uploads it to the archive again. Local gcc options can be enforced,
e.g. to optimize for i686, and the version is modified bumping the 4th
part of the debian revision (debian only uses 3) to generate a version
higher than this one and lower than any debian upload.
With this and apts pining it is trivial to install and update a system
with only locally build debs or with the prebuild debs as fallback for
the first install or as fallback for anything yet unbuild or build
failures.
This also has one big advantage over apt-get install from source: You
do not have to wait for the compile to finish. The nightly cron job
will start the build and the new debs will be ready for install in the
morning.
MfG
Goswin
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