Re: Unidentified subject!

[Mike Neuffer <mike@i-Connect.Net>]

On Fri, 21 Feb 1997, Bruce Perens wrote:
> I was wrong, you were right.
> 
> > The moment Debian moves to .rpm, Debian is dead. The only advantage we
> > have over RH is the superior packaging system.
> 
> The open development paradigm is our main advantage, IMO. 

Only as long as we differentiate us thru additional features like 
(at the moment) the package system and dependency checks. 

Once we loose this, Debian will disapear like a drop of water in the
Ocean.

> Dpkg/dselect
> is going to remain an advantage only if we take the responsibility to keep
> it up.

Yes, of course. However we have to continously search to new advantages
and try to improve. Ultimately dselect and succsessors can only be one
step in the evolution. 
 
> Regarding the rest of your message, I would like to have the entire
> release capable of being built from scratch automaticaly. It would help
> with the ports. The new format package conversion and the package order
> tools are supposed to facilitate that. 

Not quite. 
For the core system (which we will need to define) the necessary step  
which is still missing here is the fact that we do NOT upload
binary packages anymore, but instead have ONE CVS tree in which all the
source are beeing kept. Changes are beeing made as CVS commits and updates
are beeing done via cvsup, which is incredibly fast in syncing the
sourcetree. 
This morning I fetched the complete FreeBSD 2.2-GAMMA source tree with 
cvsup within about an hour. Last week Simon updated this source tree
of FreeBSD-current (like our unstable) after about week. It took about
half an hour over a 28.8 modem line. Imagine doing the same with
Debian today.......

If you want to sync or compile only parts, that is also possible.
Or just imagine you want a specific Debian version, say 1.2.1
because you need to keep all your servers in sync and you like this
release especially. a "cvsup tag=Debian_1.2.1" would get you the
source tree of that day..... No chance to do this today.....

> It should be possible to put all
> of the packages that represent the "core" in a directory, find the
> order in which to build them by running pkg-order on a subset of the
> Packages file, and then build them automaticaly. In practice there may be
> some bootstrapping required because of circular dependencies.

No, there would not be such a thing. For this we need a STATIC makefile
system (I know know a whole bunch of people are yelling now, but this is a
proven and stable way) that is capable to build the system top down in
multiple stages (like gcc itself is beeing build in 3 stages) this
resolves circular dependencies and ensures that everything is buildable
from itself.

This way we could easily take for example a RH/SPARC, but the Debian core
sourcetree on it, type "make world" and voila you get everything
for a complete Debian/SPARC. In FreeBSD this goes even so far that 
you can let it build the ISO image of the distribution CD that
you then just copy on your next CD-Recorder......

Dominik Kubla has already done quite a bit of work in this direction
a long time ago and then bagged it since nobody was interested in his 
work. He was far ahead of his time and I unfortunately wasn't in a
position to do anything about it.

Mike

Michael Neuffer                i-Connect.Net, a Division of iConnect Corp.
mike@i-Connect.Net             Home of the Debian Master Server.
mike@debian.org                14355 SW Allen Blvd., Suite 140
503.641.8774                   Beaverton, OR 97005




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