Package: debian-policy
Version: 3.5.5.0
Severity: wishlist
Hi,
The purpose of this change is to give Debian a more elegant way of
handling reduced footprint debs. Rather than including
special-purpose binaries in the archive (the status quo), I suggest we
support hooks in source packages that produce size optimized versions.
If this change is applied then the following hacks can be fixed:
- remove the e2fsprogs-bf, amiga-fdisk-bf and the proposed
reiserfsprogs-bf packages from the archive. Instead the
boot-floppies build system would build these packages from source.
(Note that it may be too late to actually do this to woody
boot-floppies. We could save some space by building optimized
versions of every package that we use on boot-floppies, maybe this
makes sense.)
- remove udeb's from the archive. The debian-installer build system
will instead build the packages from source.
Last but not least, we will be able to support embedded versions of
many other packages that aren't used by either install system. This
will make it easier to use Debian on embedded systems.
Debian is, after all, the 'Universal Operating System'.
David
--- policy.sgml.orig Sun Sep 9 23:13:31 2001
+++ policy.sgml Wed Sep 12 08:46:58 2001
@@ -1904,6 +1904,16 @@
</p>
<p>
+ A reduced footprint, limited feature and/or non-policy
+ compliant version of a package may be useful to the install
+ system, an embedded system, or another application where
+ storage space is at a premium. A source package may provide
+ such a version of itself, selectable at build time by the
+ presence of the string <tt>embedded</tt> in the environment
+ variable <tt>DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS</tt>.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
The required and optional targets are as follows:
<taglist>
<tag><tt>build</tt></tag>
