On Sun, 23 May 1999, Ron wrote:
> But what then was Ben's angle when he said the hitch with source deps
> was autodetecting them? Is this for the autobuilders for different ports,
> or concern about having non-programmer newbie developers botching them up?
The hitch is that a lot of programs require tools to build that aren't
obvious from the binary dependencies. Examples:
1. Programs that use the popt library (before it was shared) and other
static (.a) libraries.
2. Programs that require automake or autoconf (or Perl or Python or
whatever) to build.
3. Programs that require other programs to be installed so it can hook to
them at runtime. For example, programs with PGP and GnuPG hooks may
require pgp/gpg to be installed at build time so it knows where to find it
when running.
4. Packages that require specific versions of the kernel headers. libc is
(or at least was) notorious for this.
5. Packages that require a specific Debianization aid installed
(debhelper, debmake, yada...).
Some of these can be detected automatically (#5 could be discovered with a
grep on debian/rules, for example), but some can't.
Chris
--
Chris Lawrence EMail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Graduate Student, Political Science or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The University of Mississippi
Oxford, Mississippi, USA
Amiga 4000/060 AmigaOS 3.1 & Linux/m68k 2.1
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