Re: How to maintain backports? (mysql4/php4.2.3 for the curious)
On Tue, 2003-04-08 at 17:18, nate wrote:
> Fraser Campbell said:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I am curious about the best way to make and maintain backports from
> > unstable to stable. I have managed to build php 4.2.3 and mysql 4.0.12
> > from unstable in woody and they seem to work (brief testing). Here is
> > what I did:
>
> > While I did get software that appears functional I am not confident that I
> > won't find bugs down the road since I don't understand the impact of
> > building with different libraries. Here are some of the build
> > dependencies that I had to change:
>
> bigger problems may be changes in the way the debian build system works,
> e.g. quite a bit changed between 2.2 and 3.0 to the point where even though
> I could compile packages from 3.0 on 2.2 I could not make .debs out of
> them(some packages at least, many packages didn't take full advantage of
> the updated system and built fine on potato) because they depended on debian
> development stuff which didn't exist(in any version) in potato, upgrading
> the
> existing stuff would of wrecked havok on the system. sometimes I could
> work around it by commenting out a buncha lines in the rules file(sometimes
> all that wouldn't build was the documentation which would hold up the
> creation of the .deb, other times it was more serious).
This is a good point, but you only have to backport the debian
development stuff for yourself, and not make it available to others
(unless they want to build your package from source for some reason).
I backported all the automakes, debhelper, debconf and a couple others
and it didn't mess up my woody system. If you are really serious about
it, and your machine is production, check out:
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/reference/ch-tips.en.html#s-chroot
for building a parallel development chroot environment. It is not hard,
and I recommend it if you are doing a lot of development work.
Jamie
--
Email: jstrand1@rochester.rr.com
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