Re: on bootstrapping ports (was: Re: Bits from the Release Team (Jessie freeze info))

[Daniel Schepler <dschepler@gmail.com>]

Johannes Schauer wrote:
> Indeed, none of the Type 1 Self-Cycles are needed to bootstrap the core of
> Debian. Unfortunately though, most of the Type 2 Self-Cycles are. You will 
find
> many surprising (at least to me) examples in the section of "Type 2
> Self-Cycles" under the above link.

On the other hand, if you count Build-Depends-Indep and Architecture: all 
packages as part of what you want to bootstrap, then gnat-4.6 does get pulled 
in...

gzip Build-Depends-Indep: mingw-w64
mingw-w64 Build-Depends: gcc-mingw-w64-{i686,x86_64}
gcc-mingw-w64 Build-Depends: gnat-4.6

(And also, you have the issue that gcc-4.8 Build-Depends on libantlr-java and 
libecj-java, whose builds require either gcj-4.8 from the same source package, 
or openjdk-7-jdk which also Build-Depends on ecj.)

I realize that these sorts of issues aren't as important for the practical 
problem of bootstrapping a new port; but ideally, from a philosophical point 
of view we should be able to bootstrap all our packages.  (To be honest, the 
Java packages are such a tangled mess that I've given up on trying to 
bootstrap that part of the archive for now -- and many of those do get pulled 
into the minimal set of ca. 1473 source packages I get with my criteria.)
-- 
Daniel Schepler