John Goerzen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> apt-fu installs binary packages of build-depends first to avoid circular >> build-dependencies, and then builds and installs the build-depends from >> source if -R is specified. It's a nasty problem but you can't have the >> chicken without the egg, nor the egg without the chicken. > > Yeah, I have found some of those circular build-deps. I believe they > should be considered serious bugs if they aren't already. That's just > wrong. But in my case, I'd rather deal with the breakage manually than > download the .deb.
In late 2001, I spent several weekends hand-building quite a large chunk of woody (over 200 source packages). I found quite a number of serious bug in several packages, including missing Build-Deps, and, in the case of (IIRC) Tcl 8.x, it wouldn't build unless the same version was also installed (due to a shlibs problem requiring the just-built library to be installed for shlibdeps to be computed). This sort of automated source building is a very good idea--it will root out a lot of build bugs, and will improve the quality of Debian. -- Roger Leigh Printing on GNU/Linux? http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/ GPG Public Key: 0x25BFB848. Please sign and encrypt your mail.