On Thu, Aug 26, 1999 at 03:38:50PM -0400, navindra@cs.mcgill.ca wrote:
> Which reminds me, building source packages is really not as easy as
> one would hope it to be.
> I had to go through some contortions to build the potato ssh-1.2.27
> package on slink. Example: The perl5 dependency had to be edited to
> make it a perl dependency. libgmp2 had to be edited to gmp2. A bunch
Surely the gmp dependancy should be generated by shlibdeps?
> of fake PAM dependencies had to be removed... ssh-ask control section
I'd imagine that the PAM dependancies are needed on Potato, which uses
PAM.
> had to be removed since I was compiling on a non-X machine. I had to
> find a bunch of packages required for compilation by trial and
> error...
Have you seen the source dependancies proposal that either just got
accepted as policy or is about to? They should deal with the "what do I
need for this package" problem. The current best practice is to put a
note in the package (I use debian/README.source) if anything wierd is
required for compilation, but it's not at all well established.
Dealing with building and installing on an old distribution is *much*
harder - the packages for unstable are supposed to work with unstable,
not on a generic system. If the packages depended upon change then
what happens? If it's a simple renaming one could depend upon the old
package or the new package, but if it's totally new functionality that's
more than a shared library (such dependancies are generally figured out
at build time) you've got to put it in the dependancies explicitly.
Similarly for generating only part of a given source package - how much
configurability should be required?
> BSD does kind of spoil you that way.
How does BSD handle changes in packages, or dependancies on new
packages? I've got a feeling that BSD is solving a different problem to
the one Debian does.
--
Mark Brown mailto:broonie@tardis.ed.ac.uk (Trying to avoid grumpiness)
http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~broonie/
EUFS http://www.eusa.ed.ac.uk/societies/filmsoc/
Attachment:
pgpBcGIpYQPPJ.pgp
Description: PGP signature