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Re: emgrip - possible new script, based on dpkg-cross, to generate Emdebian Grip



On Mon, 2008-10-20 at 22:23 +0100, Neil Williams wrote:
> There are *no* dependency changes so it would be difficult to use
> busybox in this environment without changes to the current coreutils
> package in Debian. There are no changes to the maintainer scripts
> either, so perl is going to be needed during installation of the
> gripped .debs. This makes Emdebian Grip quite a bit bigger than Emdebian
> Crush but also quite a bit smaller than Debian. 

>  The appeal for Eee PC and similar devices
> is obvious. One of my tests will be to create an Emdebian Grip local
> mirror for i386 containing things like xfce and iceweasel, suitable for
> my Acer Aspire1 (I'll use the list of packages usually installed on the
> Aspire as a baseline for the test).

A few extra comments:

1. Gripped packages can be (carefully) used with Emdebian Crush -
provisos about perl maintainer scripts and other replacement issues
aside. This could provide a quick way to extend Emdebian Crush for
packages where cross-building does not necessarily change the binaries
in the package. I'll implement this as a dual lintian test - gripped
packages will need a lower intensity lintian check and can then be
optionally tested against the higher criteria for Crush to see if the
gripped package is likely to work on Crush. The same lintian tests could
help identify normal Debian packages that would work on Crush without
alteration, e.g. some libraries.

2. Emdebian Grip is eminently suitable for use with Debian-Installer -
indeed a normal Debian installer image could be created by passing a
repository of Gripped packages in place of a normal Debian mirror.
Issues around TDebs need to be resolved separately for Squeeze anyway.

3. Following on from #1, there are packages that will be almost
completely unaffected by emgrip - libraries that put their copyright
information into a -base or -common package, for example. I haven't
decided yet whether emgrip should work on all packages or only some
(e.g. when passed a .changes file) but potentially it could allow -doc
packages through unchanged as long as there are no reverse dependencies
for that -doc package. Hopefully, this might encourage more docs to be
moved into dedicated packages instead of being combined in with
applications and libraries.

4. Note that emgrip only changes the package version, not the package
name. This is deliberate as it clearly expresses the idea that the
functionality of the package has not changed.


-- 


Neil Williams
=============
http://www.data-freedom.org/
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/


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