Re: Bug with pkg if only a single file is installed

[Thomas Weber]

Hi, 

I'm somewhat late to the party, but a short explanation of 'creating
Debian packages'.

We only specify the build-dependencies (say: libreadline-dev). The build
tools on the autobuilders then figure out the dependency upon
libreadline for themselves (by looking at the output of ld, I guess).
So, for Debian a BuildRequires is enough. 

But please note that we might end up generating this dependency lines by
hand. Other people must be able to rebuild our packages, so we don't
fiddle with the dependencies at build time (by build time I mean the
build on the autobuilders). 


Am Donnerstag, den 14.09.2006, 22:27 +0200 schrieb David Bateman:
> We need to make the right compromise between clarity, maintainability
> and simplicity, so I think getting this one right it might be better to
> get others thoughts. Do the R packages have an automatic RPM and DEB
> build process if so they must have already dealt with this and so
> perhaps we should be inspired by their solution?

The R packages in Debian have their Dependencies-lines manually created
(at least if I understood Dirk correctly). 


> > Assuming you've created a script called called "build-rpm.sh" that
> > creates an .rpm from a package, couldn't we simply do something like
> >   ./build-rpm.sh --distro=Fedora package_file
> > ? That would make the script much more simple, and it would be much
> > harder to use.

It's not that easy. What if somemone has an older version of Fedora, but
a newer library than the one shipped with that distribution is needed?

All in all, I think you shouldn't try to reinvent rpm or deb. Make it
easy to extract the necessary lines, but I wouldn't go for
ready-to-be-built packages for every distribution. 

        Thomas