Hi, here is some ghost spooking around in my head, and maybe you can help me put it to rest.
The GNU build system makes a distinction between maintainers of a source package and the people who eventually install it. Essentially, GNU is producing a source distribution that is aiming for very high portability and ease of installation from source. Because of that, the source packages produced by GNU projects are 'fat': they contain the well-known biggish autotools build machinery, and they even had a formal 'maintainer mode' concept. That mode is falling out of favor (because it is not doing its job in the best possible way), but the release tarballs are still carefully constructed to need much fewer external software than the maintainers need when creating that release tarball. Debian is much less concered about this distinction: for example, there is no "dist" or "source" target in debian/rules, and no "Source-Depends" or "Release-Depends" field that would state the required packages for running it. Making a Debian source package always felt cumbersome: dpkg-source just tars up everything in front of it (I exaggerate, of course), and at least I am not used to having to clean my source tree before making a distribution tarball out of it. Of course, Debian doesn't really need to be as careful about making release tarballs as the GNU project: a Debian source package only needs to work in Debian, and there is no need to include pre-built documentation in the source, for example, because the tools to build it are always there. Still, I feel that this area of what should and shouldn't be in a source package is a bit under-addressed in Debian. (That is very likely only my own ignorance. I learned the little I know about packaging in Maemo; apologies might be in order for me speaking up on this list... :) On one end of the spectrum, a Debian source package could try to have as little dependencies during build-time as possible. This would be nice for distributions downstream of Debian that would have less trouble importing Debian source packages. In this case, I think we would need something like Source-Depends and making a source package would consist of running the equivalent of "make maintainer-clean && autoreconf". (If a downstream distribution wants to make changes to the source packages that it imports from Debian, it can create the changed source packages in Debian itself. Ideally, there shouldn't ever be a need to create a source package in such a--by choice--anemic downstream distribution.) On the other end of the spectrum, a source package would only contain genuine sources; it wouldn't contain anything that can be regenerated from other files in the source package. For the typical package made from a GNU upstream, this would mean always running autoreconf before configure, for example. I have the feeling that most Debian packages are somewhere in the middle, without having any real opinion about where to go: they contain lots of generated files, but there is no formal, uniform means to regenerate them. Also, no second thought is given to adding monster toolchains like gtk-doc-tools to Build-Depends. I think the first end of the spectrum is more flexible, and adding the necessary bits to Debian (such as a "source" target in debian/rules) would allow Debian to become a lot stronger as a repository of source packages. This added strength would mostly help the people lifting code from Debian, of course, but I think Debian itself would also benefit from it. For example, Debian's 'lesser' architectures might have an easier time with reduced build-dependencies, and it might even be possible to formally allow 'cross' architectures into Debian: those architectures would not be as general as the big ones and all packages for them would be cross-compiled, perhaps. (Reducing build-dependencies of source packages goes a long way towards cross-compilability.) Also, being more careful about source packages can help with keeping things in VCS. The new formalism for creating source packages can make it easier to create them automatically from a 'bare' CVS branch that doesn't contain any generated files. That is actually what got me started thinking about this in the first place: I want to keep my sources (both upstream and packaged) in a VCS without any generated files; I want to automatically create source packages of a bare branch in a rich environment; and I want to automatically compile these source packages in a poor environment (that doesn't have all the tools I use during development). So, what do you think? -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
