library packages and Debian

Ian Lynagh igloo at earth.li
Mon Sep 15 14:24:40 EDT 2003


On Sat, Sep 13, 2003 at 12:19:53PM -0400, David Roundy wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 12, 2003 at 10:38:32AM +0100, Ross Paterson wrote:
> > [rather Debian-specific, I'm afraid]
> 
> ...
> 
> > Would the following work?
> > 
> > - one source package per library package, generating a binary package
> >   for each compiler (and each architecture).  Debian maintainer for the
> >   package gets it working with each compiler, and records dependencies
> >   on specific version numbers of each compiler in the control file.
> >   (Maybe there are compiler- and architecture-independent packages too.)
> 
> No.  Debian only allows build-depends on a per-source package basis, so
> this would mean that the library would be restricted to platforms on which
> all haskell compilers exist.

ghc6 build-depends on gcc-2.95 [sparc] meaning gcc-2.95 is needed on
sparc only.

The problem as I see it is that either you have to make the build-deps
stricter than they need to be to force things to build with the latest
compiler version or you need to wait for the buildds to build the new
compiler on all arches before uploading the libraries. This wouldn't be
so bad if the chances of all the buildds actually working at any given
time was better, although a binary upload could be done by hand for the
one or two broken ones.

The first option means that someone who has an older compiler
(backporting to stable, don't want to upgrade to the latest version for
some reason, or whatever) can't tell the difference between a library
trying to build with this version and one which won't build with earlier
versions.


Thanks
Ian



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