(first question:) What do I need to do to recompile expect from the sources? I have the following packages installed,
ii expect5.24 5.28.1-1 ii expect5.24-dev 5.28.1-1 ii tk4.2 4.2p2-7 ii tk8.0 8.0.4-2 ii tk8.0-dev 8.0.4-2 ii tcl7.6 7.6p2-7 ii tcl8.0 8.0.4-2 ii tcl8.0-dev 8.0.4-2 but when I unpack expect_5.28.1-1.dsc and run debian/rules binary the configure script gives this warning: checking for Tcl private headers... found in /usr/include/tcl8.0-int/generic checking type of library to build... both shared and unshared creating cache .././config.cache checking for Tcl configuration... configure: warning: Can't find Tcl configuration definitions Dbgconfigure: #: No such file or directory cp: ./Dbg504/tcldbgcf.h: No such file or directory and a bit later it fails when gcc'ing exp_command.c because gcc encounters a line with "setpgrp(0,0)" (wrong number of arguments!)... I remember vaguely not being able to recompile expect on hamm also... Now for the other questions, supposing that the answer to the first question is not trivial. * Shouldn't there be, in cases like this one, some kind of "README.debian.compiling" in the source package telling users what special steps they must take? * Is there a treasure trove of compilations tricks somewhere? * Is there a script to recompile all packages from a distribution? I know that only the maintainer can PGP-sign a package, but maybe there's something around that tests if all packages compile OK... * How do I make an expectk that uses Tcl7.6 and Tk4.2? * What happened to the idea of adding a "Source-Depends" field to .dscs? Do people really care about that, or is it being forgotten? Please excuse me if I'm sounding too harsh, and, yes, I do know how much work does it take to debianize certain packages. But one of my deepest beliefs is that the most important thing a user (!) must know (besides reading and writing and running man and info and emacs and strace) is how to unpack and recompile the source code of a package, and I don't think that many people here consider this as important as me. So I've been trying to do my work silently, lurking too much, posting too little and keeping my radicalism to myself. This posting is an exception... Eduardo Ochs [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.mat.puc-rio.br/~edrx/ (<--perpetual mess).
