On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 04:25:29PM +0100, Karsten Hilbert wrote:
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.
There are exceptions for cases like this *if needed*. I intentionally
marked the last two words because it seems that there are ways to work
around this. I would be much in preference if we could create the
initial package without binary files if there is some alternative way to
create the automatically created files. Could anybody from the GT.M
experts give some estimate for the effort which is actually needed. The
vague "it takes time" argument given in Bashkars mail is a bit weak.
It also takes time to get the binary stuff in - avoiding this would be
quite high on my priority list.
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.
I can not imagine that finding a way to create a "small number" (can you
give exact numbers please) should be that hard. For instance if you
take the effort I took to dive from scratch into Java packaging to build
packages for several prerequisites of target programs to make them
finally distributable in main this was more than creating "some files"
by other means than they are usually created.
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.
It's source code, right. It was created automatically by using DFSG
free software by the copyright holders. I do not see any reason why
this should not be DFSG free. So if the firles are even *there* and do
not need to be created, why not pointing us to a tarball / patch set
which enables building from plain source?