Re: Tutorial: using proposed source packaging format as non-root

[Mark Eichin <eichin@cygnus.com>]

Detail: I think "installing" sources is fundamentally wrong.  This is
partly aesthetic, but that is derived from large scale systems
experience -- there's the system, and there are the users, and
building packages is a *user* function, not a *system* function.  (The
required use of /usr/src/linux for the linux kernel was a mistake
[which was corrected years ago] -- and no, NetBSD is not a
counter-example, the distribution can be rooted elsewhere and is, from
their perspective, *one* build tree.)

Now, that leads to the question "how do we know what other sources are
already in place, then?" but see my other suggestion for having
dpkg-source handle source aggregation.  (I don't like calling that
"dependency" because it isn't -- prc-tools [an m68k cross compiler and
other stuff for the pilot] *depends* on things like awk and make, but
it *includes* gcc.)  I don't think we *need* to know -- we just need
to be able to get them so we can unpack them and do a build.

Part of that is because "src.deb" files don't seem to solve a problem
that I actually have.  Once the src.deb files is unpacked, I now have
the .tgz and .diff files on disk, sure -- but I *already* have them,
in my local mirror.  It looks to me like I'd install the collection of
src.debs, and then dpkg-source -x, err, I mean "make unpack" [they
*are* filling the same slot, right?]... whereas now, I'd just point
some symlinks at my mirror and run dpkg-source -x.

Another thought: while this looks somewhat convenient for someone
unpacking the debian sources and building them,  it looks a bit
*messier* for those of us who actually produce the packages in the
first place.