Re: Compiling Debian from source, with GCC 3.4.2
* Laurence Darby <ldarby@mips.com> [2006-03-03 14:55]:
> Recompiling Debian isn't on my task list anymore, see below for why.
> But if you want to, go ahead.
Yeah, I started yesterday.
> I should have started with buildd, or was it sbuild, or was it
> wanna-build, or was it wtf-do-you-build debian with...
buildd = generic time for a machine running a build daemon
sbuild = the program used to actually build a program in a chroot
wanna-build = the software which checks which new packages to build,
then starts sbuild, communicates via email with the buildd admin
(i.e. sends build logs, etc).
In your case, sbuild would have been enough. It has a README file
that explains how to use the software and how to setup a chroot.
sbuild expects that you pass it a package name and its version
as package_version. I've written a small script that takes the list
of packages from a mirror, puts them in a file as "package_version"
and then I run a for loop over that file.
> Not that well. I found a couple of GCC bugs, after compiling over
> 12000 deb packages, and about 400 failures that didn't look like SDE
> or MIPS specific compiler bugs (broken build-deps etc).
Yes, usually most failures are generic, and many bugs have been
reported already. I have to check what the best way is to ignore
packages that are known not to build in the first place. I guess
wanna-build could help, or at least the information from wanna-build
(on http://buildd.debian.org/)
> The main problem was that I do not have the endurance to follow and
> debug the instructions to create a mirror out of the the 12000 packages
> (or even just the 100 base packages), then to build a debian-installer
> that used these packages.
Ah, you wanted to run these packages as well, not just compile them?
Actually, this is pretty easy (if you know how, I suppose). You just
dump all .deb files in a directory and then run "dpkg-scanpackages".
Then you can put in an appropriate line in /etc/apt/sources.list and
it'll download the packages from there.
> I guess you need a PhD to understand Debian, I've got only a degree.
Well, I have don't have a PhD, and if I continue spending all my time
on Debian and MIPS I probably won't get one. :-P It's certainly true,
though, that you do need to know a number of things; however, that's
true with every large project. It would take me ages to get started
on a project such as GCC, for example. Anyway, if you have a cool
MIPS project involving Debian in mind in the future, feel free to
get in contact and I'll try to help.
> The other major problem, ie. demotivation, was that even though it's
> real world code for the compiler to chew on, it wasn't testing
> coverage of the options (-O3 -finline-loops -fwhatever) , and
> there's no sustainable and procedural way to test all the generated
Yeah, that's certainly true.
--
Martin Michlmayr
http://www.cyrius.com/
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