Re: Bootstrapping: list of 81 self-cycles in Debian Sid
Hi,
Quoting Simon McVittie (2013-03-05 16:54:00)
> This is useful information. Is there any way in which the maintainers of
> these packages can say "yes, we know, and here is where you break the cycle"
> without using unmerged dpkg features or breaking the freeze?
I'm afraid there is little one can do right now because of the two reasons you
mentioned. If somebody is very eager to help out, then one way to help is by
expanding these lists:
https://gitorious.org/debian-bootstrap/bootstrap/trees/master/droppable
They are plain ascii text files which list the droppable build dependencies for
source packages until build profiles are supported by Debian. The lists
currently contain contributions from Thorsten Glaser, Patrick McDermott, Daniel
Schepler, Wookey and Gentoo USE flags. The more complete these lists are, the
better the current approximation of how a real Debian bootstrap would look like
is. We are currently down to only 11 build dependencies our algorithms suggest
to remove but of which we do not know whether this would be possible in
practice or not. Those lists become obsolete once Debian supports build
profiles and enough packages in the archive implement them.
> If not, now is not really the time to be doing anything about these cycles:
> wheezy has been frozen for well over 6 months, and maintainers who want to be
> able to fix 'important' bugs in wheezy are avoiding non-freeze-compatible
> changes to unstable.
Agreed. I am not saying anybody should implement any of the suggestions right
now (even creating patches for later would be a gamble until there is a
decision on the profile format). Instead, I wanted to report this new ability
of our bootstrap tools, raise awareness of the problem and educate maintainers
about this type of issue during a bootstrap of Debian. I should've better
explained my intentions in my initial email. :)
It is unfortunate that this work is being done during a freeze because it means
that nothing I implement right now can be tried out in practice without going
through a ridiculous amount of work. But I rather wanted to implement all this
functionality now than wait until the freeze is over. This way, once wheezy is
released, we already have a number of tools which at least should work on
paper. :D
cheers, josch
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