Debian concordance

[Ante Karamatić]

On Tue, 2005-06-14 at 21:34 +1000, John Skaller wrote:

> Yes, but that's not what I want to do. I have a package manager,
> I want it to install things. If I have to mess around building
> a binary package by hand, then installing it .. I might as
> well just download and build the original tarball.

You don't do it by hand. If you put Sid's deb-src sources in
sources.list, only thing you have to do is:

apt-get build-dep <package-you-want-from-sid>
apt-get -b source <package-you-want-from-sid>
dpkg -i <package-you-want-from-sid>*.deb

That's it. Mostly, this will work. There are couple of situations where
this won't work without few tweaks in debian/control.

Binary packages are really hard to mix together because of libc6 and
other major differences beetween distributions. I'm buged by that
problem too. It really is anoying.

I think packages shouldn't depend on revision packages (they should only
if they need too, like in CXX transition). For example, it's silly for a
package to depend on version 1.2.3-45, and refuse to install on
1.2.3-44. Great example is libc6 in Hoary and libc6 in Sarge
(glibc-2.3.2.ds1-20ubuntu13 vs 2.3.2.ds1-22). Because of this, you can't
install Sarge's Samba (diff beetween hoary and sarge sambe is 4 versions
and it's nice to have newer Samba) on Hoary, even if the binary would
work without problems.

This is silly and should be managed somehow.

With packaging mechanisam like it's now in Debian, this can't be
resolved, so I call from discussions about things like this. This can't
be too hard to implement. And this is great time to do that, right after
one stable release of Debian, this could be changed in the begining of
the next release.

-- 
Ante Karamatic|--|ivoks(@)grad.hr|--|PGP: D3BDA225
http://master.grad.hr/~ivoks/|--|ICQ: 64631782
May, 15. <herve> we're fixing the universe, it's not an easy duty!