Hello, For various reasons [1], I am interested in building Debian from source -- and continuing to do so for upgrades and newly-installed packages.
What I'm after is basically something where I can say: apt-foo install kde The system will then: 1. Look at kde and build/install any of its build-deps 2. Build kde 3. Build/install any Depends or Pre-Depends of kde 4. Install kde (These four steps would be repeated for all dependencies that had to be filled.) In other words, at no time would a .deb be downloaded. All .debs would be built locally and installed locally. I'd also like to be able to say: apt-foo dist-upgrade Which would essentially run the above steps and upgrade my system. Again, no .deb would ever be downloaded; they'd be built and installed locally. We seem to already have the metadata necessary to do this, but as far as I can tell, our existing tools don't support it. For instance: * apt-build has an option to build a package and all packages it depends upon, but always downloads binary .debs of -dev packages. (Or maybe I got this backwards; I'm not sitting at my apt-build machine right now.) * pbuilder and sbuild don't bother with actual installation, so they don't resolve dependencies at all. Also, they only download .debs of build-deps. The nearest I have seen is fink, but I know little about it. Am I missing something? Is anyone working on this? Thanks, John [1] I want to experiment with different optimizations on the Alpha... plus this would significantly reduce the number of CD's I'd have to carry around to have a whole Debian release with me. One binary CD for each arch, plus a source CD set that would work for them all.
