Re: Getting package build dependencies

[Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>]

Jon Dowland <jon@alcopop.org> writes:

> On Thu, Oct 26, 2006 at 01:48:45PM +0200, Goswin von
> Brederlow wrote:
>> As to your real problem. I was playing around with
>> building dummy packages (src-<pkg>) on the fly from the
>> Sources file that depends on all Build-Depends.
>
> Me too!
>
>> The idea was that you would 'aptitude install src-foo' to
>> install the build-depends for foo and src-foo would be
>> flagged manual then. Removing src-foo would drop all the
>> build-depends too.
>
> I was going to generate src-foo locally and either drop the
> .deb in $(pwd) or call aptitude install on the result.
>
> I'll try and knock together a proof-of-concept...

That would require generating some 12K src-foo packages or filter
"apt* install" commands for src-foo packages and generate them on the
fly. Two things I found not so trivial. You also need the correct
md5sum for the packages file for apt* to accept your debs, so you are
back to generating all 12K src-foo packages in advance. Using a dummy
deb and wrapping dpkg-deb saves that.

Or you have to manualy create each src-foo deb when needed. That would
be simple too. A small wrapper around equivs to build the deb, then
dpkg -i and tell aptitude that it is manual.

MfG
        Goswin