On Sun, 22 Jun 1997, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> - having a central repository for autoconf test result might speed things
> up (I think autoconf supports this; someone should investigate)
Yes; I do it. You need to set the environment variable CONFIG_SITE to the
name of a file---I use /etc/config.site---which includes the line
cache_file="/var/config.cache"
or whatever path you want. Note that installing libraries will require the
cache to be cleared (in general; frequently it won't but I wouldn't like to
get a computer program to decide when), but so long as you're just compiling
and not installing the packages things would be OK.
> - source dependencies would be nice, but are not absolutely necessary
Two types: where you need another packages source (are there any like that?)
and where you need other packages such as -dev packages installed.
> - the build process is too verbose, it is difficult to see any warnings
> and errors in the voluminous output
Mostly just what make always does. To disable it use the -s (or --silent or
--quiet) option to make: you can set the MAKEFLAGS environment variable.
There's also some other output from dpkg-buildpackage, I don't know whether
that can be disabled or not.
> - idea: developers upload source only, central machine(s) build
> .debs, so that everything uses the same libs, etc
Not when, as at present, all of debian/rules has to be run as root.
> g77: needs gcc source code to build
Yes, but the alternative is for the source package to be much bigger than it
needs to be. A better solution would be to merge the source packages.
> java-lex: needs a java compiler (javac), which isn't part of bo
> proper (theres jdk in non-free, kaffe in contrib)
(is kaffe in contrib only because it needs non-free libraries?)
