[sclug] Spring cleaning

[Simon Huggins]

Hi David,

On Sat, Apr 17, 2004 at 04:43:08PM +0100, David Given wrote:
> Simon Huggins wrote:
> [...]
> >Eh what?  Build everything?  Er, why?  :)
> >
> >I think I'd rather watch paint dry than watch X compile and you
> >certainly wouldn't want to do the building on the mini-itx box.  I
> >haven't tried a kdrive X server but I'm told X needs about 2GB of disk
> >to build.
> Reproducability.

Whereas installing the same binary packages that you've kept around
wouldn't be reproducible at all.  Um.

> You see, I'm not coming from this from the desktop mindset. I'm coming 
> from this from the embedded mindset. What I want is a single, consistent 
> source tree that I can cross-compile into a CD image. I want to be able 
> to check everything out of CVS and reproduce, exactly, that image for 
> any version of my program. It's not going to be built on the mini-ITX 
> box, ever.

So you keep versions of the packages you used around with a script to
install the exact versions you use along with all the binary packages
you installed.  If you want/need the source you could keep that too but
you wouldn't need to build it every time.  If you use the image a lot
then I guess you would just keep the image.

> I *did* think about using Debian's ability to install packages to 
> arbitrary locations to write a script that would install the appropriate 
> packages, delete all the extraneous stuff (/usr/share/doc, for example) 
> and then add my custom code, but that runs into problems when I want to 
> use a customised version of a major package. KDrive X, for example. 
> There's no Debian package for that (plus you need one for each supported 
> video card).

If there's not a package you could make one or you could just install it
without packaging.

> BSD makes all this so much easier. I just say, check out this stuff from 
> the BSD CVS repository, apply my patch, build, burn.

And three years later... :)

I'm still not entirely convinced that building things yourself leads to
more reproducibility though I can understand that you would probably
have to modify the packages in any case and so if you're building them
yourself then there may be better ways of doing it.

-- 
----------(      "Fast, fat computers breed slow, lazy       )----------
Simon ----(                  programmers."                   )---- Nomis
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