Re: Debian vs. Ubuntu source control file
On Mi, Jan 06, 2010 at 08:32:45 (CET), Russ Allbery wrote:
> I am personally not horribly fond of a package building differently on
> Debian or Ubuntu via only this mechanism, though. I think it violates a
> very important invariant: the same package with the same version number
> will have the same contents.
AFAIUI, this invariant is not valid since the very first releasse of
ubuntu.
> It's normally possible to freely mix Debian and Ubuntu packages
> provided that the dependencies are met, but if the Debian and Ubuntu
> packages have different contents despite being indistinguishable from
> the perspective of the package manager, that makes it extremely
> difficult to do that. Now, every system must be exclusively Debian or
> Ubuntu or risk getting inconsistent packages that can't be
> distinguished from each other.
I would phrase it: "It's often possible to freely mix Debian and Ubuntu
packages, but this may or may not bring unexpected, surprising results".
Seriously, even in debian the package contents of packages with the same
version number can vary (but here only across architectures). The
contents of a package depend on:
- the mechanics of debian/rules
- the presence or absence of build-dependencies
- the presence or absence of specific library versions
the last point is often the case when the soname of some dependent
library has its SONAME bumped and that the current package encodes that
SONAME in some path. I don't have concrete examples in mind, but I'm
sure that something like this is easily implementable with
e.g. pkg-config.
> Maybe there's some way that could also be addressed, such as by having the
> source package build binary packages with a different version number
> depending on what platform on which they're built? Add "ubuntu" to the
> end of the source version number to form the binary version number if
> built on Ubuntu, for instance?
What problem does this solve? Binary packages are already
distinguishable by looking at the Maintainer field.
--
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4
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