Profile support in apt
I am clueless about the internals of apt so thought I'd ask here for a
pointer.
One of the few pieces missing from making Debian (cross-)
bootstrappable is the ability to pass a 'profile/staging'
configuration to apt so that apt-get build-dep foo will miss out some
build-deps as marked-up in package foo's control info.
This may well be very easy, if you know where to look, at is should
just be matter of reading the the build-deps line and filtering in/out
the specified items. Nothing else about the logic changes.
It has now got to the point wherer I'd like to try and do this so that
all builds can be done via sbuild, instead of profile/staged builds
having to manually choose build-deps and run dpkg-buildpackage.
If apt honours DEB_BUILD_PROFILE=foo then sbuild (which already has a
patch to set this) just sets it and everything should 'just work' (we
already have dpkg patches to make it DTRT).
So, pointers as to which files/functions I should be looking at are
what this post hopes to elicit, although of course patches showing
just how trivial it is, would be even better :-)
There is an old bug for this with an obsolete patch for an older
scheme: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=661537 which
just got apt to allow and ignore extra field names. That has been
superseded by new syntax for the existing fields, which still needs to
be tied down in detail, but a working implementation for the currently
proposed sytax will be useful right now and can be munged a bit as it
is finalised.
Current state of spec is here:
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianBootstrap
cheers
Wookey
--
Principal hats: Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM
http://wookware.org/
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