Re: Smarter dpkg/apt rather than new distro ?
On Fri, 2004-02-27 at 17:32, Wookey wrote:
> +++ Geoff Brimhall [04-02-24 22:37 -0800]:
> > Been reading through the goals of emdebian, and the
> > thought popped up that rather than create a whole new
> > distro, make a smarter dpkg/apt which would strip the
> > unwanted parts out of a *.deb, or divert them to the
> > compact flash storage for use when needed.
> What we are really creating is infrastructure, tools and policy - the distro
> itself (possibly themselves) is really a side-effect of that.
> So whilst we are of course making 'yet another distro', I sincerely hope
> we're doing it in a way that will actually produce a set of meta-distro
> tools and that this will reduce the amount of duplicated work, rather than
> increase it.
I had a cunning plan while lying in the bath this morning that I think
might fix most of the documentation problems and allow us to use
something much closer to original Debian.
What we can do is build a set of packages that provide all the
documentation building commands but they dont actually do anything, so
for example dummy-pdflatex just has a shell script that outputs a very
small valid pdf file perhaps saying "Documentation not built". These
packages provide all the build dependencies you need, giving you a
bootstrapping tool, and as a byproduct remove almost all documentation.
You can use this as a Debian bootstrapper too, as when you build the
real packages they will replace the dummy ones, so an autobuilder should
eventually build the real thing.
I am sure there will be some issues with packages requiring specific
versions of packages needed to build docs, but it might get quite a long
way.
Justin
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