Re: my experiences
Hello Tim,
thanks for all the little things you took the time to write down!
On Wed, Jun 09, 1999 at 12:25:04PM -1000, Tim Newsham wrote:
>
> first complaint: the files listed in the guide are not complete.
> The up to date list is in the cross-install script itself,
> a point which is never mentioned.. This should probably be
> mentioned somewhere
I sent Matthew a patch for some minor corrections to the guide, but it seems
it is not fully integrated yet. Matthew is currentyl very busy in
university, but will soon have time to upgrade the guide.
> second complaint: the cross-install can find files in the local
> directory or in a subdir (base, admin, text, etc). *BUT*
> it uses wildcards to find files, so if the files are not
> stored in subdiretories, it is possible for the wildcard to
> pick up on the wrong file during the install process. For
> example perl* will match perl_5* and perl_base*.
This should not happen, because it matches perl_* and the name is really
perl-base ("-" vs "_"). Got the name mangled by downloading from Windows or
something? It should work anyway. The package name is unique when read from
start to first underscore.
> third complaint: Some files need renaming. In some cases the
> script tries to install stuff like "libc0.2" when the files
> are named libc0_2*. I renamed files, it probably would have
> been easier if I just edited the script.
libc0_2 is completely wrong. I am now quite sure you downloaded in Windows
and it mangled the names :)
> So files are all renamed, now I'm in business this time. Ok, so
> I start running it, and notice that I don't have the debian package
> programs that I need. Now here's a really big complaint, but its
> aimed more at debian than the debian hurd project in particular.
[...]
>
> fourth complaint: It was never mentioned that dpkg was required,
> or how to get/build it. Dpkg src needs some work so that it
> can be built on systems other than debian-linux.
dpkg is mentioned in my patch to Matthews guide, too.
That dpkg can't hardly be build from source without major insight in the
packaging system and manual interaction is true and very sad. The current
state of the dpkg source is almost fubar. :(
(But then, there is a project to rewrite dpkg, so we can hope)
> Ok, with dpkg set up and running, I was able to run the scripts further
> only to find more script problems:
>
> fifth complaint: Although the debian linux test/[ program supports
> '==', not all test programs do. I had to replace == with = in
> the dpkg-hurd script. In addition, the script did things like
> 'if [ ${1} = "-x" ]'. Oops! That's bad. The dash in front of
> the ${1} arg can confuse poor old test. I changed those type
> tests to 'if [ "x${1}" = "x-x" ]'
The == vs = part is fixed in the latest version, it may be that I did not
upload it yet, sorry. The "x${1}" needs to be fixed, thanks! This was my
first serious shell scripting, and I was not aware of those
incompatibilities.
> sixth complaint: I had to run 'mkfs.e2fs -o hurd /dev/xxx' not
> 'mke2fs -o hurd /dev/hdxx'. The docs should point out that
> the command may be different in different linux distributions.
Yeah, well. That's another one for Matthew :)
Thanks for your comments,
Marcus
--
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org finger brinkmd@
Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org master.debian.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de for public PGP Key
http://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/Marcus.Brinkmann/ PGP Key ID 36E7CD09
Reply to: