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Re: [MoM] Packaging fis-get



On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 09:46:17AM -0500, Bhaskar, K.S wrote:

> >- GT.M is written in Mumps and thusly needs to be compiled
> >   by a Mumps compiler
> >
> >- this presents a chicken-egg problem in that Debian does
> >   not allow packages to be included without compiling them
> >   from source
> 
> [KSB2] GT.M is almost entirely written in C with a few small bits in
> assembler.

That makes it a lot easier.

> Some utility programs are written in MUMPS.

Are those needed to build GT.M ?

> When building GT.M, some C source programs are generated from text files
> using a MUMPS program -

Are those files *required* to build GT.M ?

> this is where GT.M is used to build GT.M, and
> it is a text to text transformation.

How much data are we talking about ?

> However, I don't really understand the problem with bootstrapping.
> It only needs to be done once and that bootstrap has already been
> accomplished.

No it hasn't (as far as Debian is concerned) or else there
would be an installable Debian package for bootstrapping
GT.M.

I might be wrong. If so, please point me to the DFSG
compatible package I can install to either bootstrap a GT.M
or a DFSG-compliantly valid GT.M package.

The "problem" with bootstrapping is that Debian does not
allow to use "foreign" binaries (that is, binaries not
buildable on Debian) in order to build packages.

> In my opinion, if you really want to eliminate the bootstrap,

We/I don't want to eliminate it. We want to get it done
because we have to if we want to have GT.M on Debian.

> the obvious solution is to use awk or perl for the small
> number of files involved.

For example. That is one of the options I am trying to
assess how complicated it would be.

> Or, for the initial bootstrap, just take the generated C
> files from an existing GT.M for the bootstrap.

Since those *are* source code I wonder whether that might be
compliant with DFSG.

Anyone ?

BTW: In case all this has already been solved in an
existing, compliant Debian (pre-)package we would surely
like to know about it !

Karsten
-- 
GPG key ID E4071346 @ gpg-keyserver.de
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