Is it worth catering dpkg to the needs of initial porters, as opposed to everyday users? Keeping dependancies simple would affect only a tiny portion of people.
While I've never played w/ AIX, I have compiled/installed dpkg on non-debian systems (ie, slackware). I don't see how requiring md5sum would be a major issue; compile it and dpkg from source, install, and then create debian packages from there. Also, since dpkg could still build md5sum (make md5sum a virtual package, and have textutils-md5sum, dkpg-md5sum, etc), there would be no reason to have it as a build-dep.. Depending on how Glenn meant for it to be split up. On Wed, Mar 06, 2002 at 11:53:17AM -0600, Jor-el wrote: > > On Tue, 5 Mar 2002, Glenn McGrath wrote: > > > On Wed, 27 Feb 2002 17:24:57 -0500 > > "Andres Salomon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > > There is also a c library providing md5, one from libwww0 (packaged) and > > another unpackaged libmd5 project > > (ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/ghost/packages/md5.tar.gz). > > > > Ive been thinking for a while that md5 is generally usefull enough to be a > > seperate package, even though its small its still good to reuse code. > > > > If dpkg wanted to use the unpackaged libmd5 i would be prepared to package > > it. > > > Glenn, > > I think 'dpkg' is an example of the case where code reuse of the > nature you mention is not necessarily a good thing. Adding additional > build dependancies for dpkg is not a good thing if one considers the > porting to a new OS / architecture problem. I am in the middle of a port > to AIX and have found out that some sgml packages have to be available > first to build dpkg docs. Which I cant install as a deb unless I first > complete the port of dpkg. In general, I think the less chicken and egg > type problems there are with dpkg the better. > > Regards, > Jor-el > > -- Andres Salomon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Voxel Dot Net, Inc. 518.269.0569
