+++ Riku Voipio [2011-02-18 11:53 +0200]: > On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 04:27:52AM +0000, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote: > > precisely. this is another, (clearer or at least different) way of > > stating what i've been advocating. by having such a delta-maintaining > > tool, complex sets of deltas can be maintained indefinitely, or in > > fact completely reworked. > > We dont *want* to maintain deltas. If we start maintaining deltas, we are no > longer Debian, we are a fork. Lets end this discussion now.
Very succincly put. There is nothing wrong with the idea of using bitbake to bootstrap Debian, except that what you end up with is a set of fixes outside the Debian packaging. Even though it is harder and slower, I believe it a better long-term solution to do whatever it takes to get those fixes inside the packaging (or upstream, as appropriate). I have been doing a fair amount of research, thinking, discussion and documentation on this over the last couple of months, and intend to do some finalising and proper implementing of that next week. I have refrained from writing long emails about the reasoning and practicialities of this because I was expecting to be able to have the discussion in person next week. Unfortunately luke won't be there to have the argument in person, but I hope even he'd agree that the 'best' solution is to do it in Debian proper. It is true that this work only fixes the problem at hand (cyclic dependencies, bootstraping staged builds, bootstrap sequencing and cross-building the axiomatic set of base-node packages); it does not provide a generic mechanism for layering a patch set over Debian sources. Both OE and the emdebian tools provide such mechanisms, and that concept is useful for all sorts of reasons in the real world. I'd like to do more work on this idea in the future so that it was relatively easy to do. But it's really important to understand that you should only be using such mechanisms because it's expedient, and appropriate for your circumstances. It's not something that is appropriate for solving _Debian's_ problems. Wookey -- Principal hats: Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM http://wookware.org/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
