On Fri, 2004-02-27 at 17:32, Wookey wrote: > +++ Geoff Brimhall [04-02-24 22:37 -0800]: > > Been reading through the goals of emdebian, and the > > thought popped up that rather than create a whole new > > distro, make a smarter dpkg/apt which would strip the > > unwanted parts out of a *.deb, or divert them to the > > compact flash storage for use when needed.
> What we are really creating is infrastructure, tools and policy - the distro > itself (possibly themselves) is really a side-effect of that. > So whilst we are of course making 'yet another distro', I sincerely hope > we're doing it in a way that will actually produce a set of meta-distro > tools and that this will reduce the amount of duplicated work, rather than > increase it. I had a cunning plan while lying in the bath this morning that I think might fix most of the documentation problems and allow us to use something much closer to original Debian. What we can do is build a set of packages that provide all the documentation building commands but they dont actually do anything, so for example dummy-pdflatex just has a shell script that outputs a very small valid pdf file perhaps saying "Documentation not built". These packages provide all the build dependencies you need, giving you a bootstrapping tool, and as a byproduct remove almost all documentation. You can use this as a Debian bootstrapper too, as when you build the real packages they will replace the dummy ones, so an autobuilder should eventually build the real thing. I am sure there will be some issues with packages requiring specific versions of packages needed to build docs, but it might get quite a long way. Justin
