Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: Debian sources for building monotone

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Sun, Dec 28, 2003 at 01:20:50AM -0500, graydon hoare wrote:
> Nathaniel Smith wrote:
> >On Sun, Dec 28, 2003 at 01:37:06AM +0000, Faheem Mitha wrote:
> >>Would it be possible to have the Debian sources for builing monotone
> >>available? That would be more flexible. The binary version of monotone
> >>on the monotone web site has dependencies which are not currently in
> >>testing or unstable.
> >
> >
> >I thought the binary version of monotone on the website wasn't supposed
> >to have any dependencies other than libc.  Has this changed?
> 
> the debian package is dynamically linked against the system libraries, 
> including libc, popt, pthreads, and (alas) boost. I might change this 
> back to static now that I have this configure flag for semi-static 
> builds, not sure. I don't know how much debian as an organization will 
> want to enforce dynamic linking, and I'd someday like to get monotone 
> into debian main.

Oh, I see, I thought that the question referred to the simply binary
executable download.

Debian will probably want dynamic linking, simply because it uses less
space, is more efficient, easier to maintain, and (in the context of a
package included in a distribution that also includes working versions
of boost, etc.) reliable.  This is less true when distributed as a
third-party package; the easiest solution is probably to just provide
a source package, and let people recompile it to use their versions of
the libraries.

If you want to be really fancy, you can put it in an apt-able
repository, and then people with different versions of boost can do:
  apt-get build-dep monotone
  apt-get --build source monotone   # this spits out a binary .deb
  dpkg -i monotone-blah.deb

-- Nathaniel

-- 
So let us espouse a less contested notion of truth and falsehood, even
if it is philosophically debatable (if we listen to philosophers, we
must debate everything, and there would be no end to the discussion).
  -- Serendipities, Umberto Eco