Building contrib packages
Hi All:
I have been maintaining a contrib package which, unfortunately, depends on
a non-free package, pgplot5, to be built. This invariably causes problems
because contrib packages are autobuilt by the normal buildd network and
some, not all, of the buildd machines do not include the non-free sources.
The consequence is that the build fails completely.
I have circumvented this for most architecures by purchasing one of each
different architecture (except for s390 and hppa) and just building the
package on all of them and uploading multiple binaries ar a time.
Nevertheless, the package is stalled in unstable becuse the remaining
architectures are failing to build for the above reason.
I have asked for the non-free sources to be included on the buildds and
this is not universally thought to be a good idea so I have come up with
another suggestion. How about if contrib packages, which are after all
not officially part of Debian, are moved off the official buildd network
and onto the unofficial non-free buildd network?
It stands to reason that the non-free buildd network would include the
non-free sources and so would be the right place to build the contrib
packages. I have found this network to be quite reliable, in general as
my non-free packages are built without any problems.
I rather like having 8 different architectures in my server room but
manually building all the binaries each time I release a new version of
my contrib packages is tedious.
I suspect that there might be others with the same problem. I would much
rather not have to deal with non-free but the pgplot5 package is,
unfortunately, unique and as of now there is no free replacement for it.
Cheers,
Carlo
--
Carlo U. Segre -- Professor of Physics
Associate Dean for Graduate Admissions, Graduate College
Illinois Institute of Technology
Voice: 312.567.3498 Fax: 312.567.3494
segre@iit.edu http://www.iit.edu/~segre segre@debian.org
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