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