On Wed, Aug 18, 2021 at 8:10 AM Simon Josefsson wrote: > 1) Trust paths.
Agreed, this is the main exception I mentioned when starting this thread. > 2a) Gnulib. Presumably upstream could be convinced to encode this information into the VCS, perhaps into the standard autogen script that is usually run before running ./configure for autotools projects, although Debian just uses autoreconf by default. Or the debian/rules could have this information added. Although hopefully the existing gnulib package would just work. Since gnulib is meant as an embedded code copy IIRC, another alternative would be to add the requisite files as a second tarball containing the desired parts of gnulib, with component gnulib: foo_1.2.3.orig-gnulib.tar.gz. > 2b) Cross-compilation and dependency cycles. The build profiles mechanism was invented to solve dependency cycles. Unfortunately the Debian package build/storage infrastructure doesn't yet support building non-default build profiles, so you have to bootstrap manually on your own systems and or the porterboxen and then upload the resulting binaries. We would need a way for maintainers to specify the desired build profiles, support for storing non-default build profiles in a separate archive (aka we need bikesheds) in dak and support in the build infrastructure for using the desired build profile and sending the results to the right bikeshed. https://wiki.debian.org/BuildProfileSpec Cross-builds mostly use the same packages as normal builds, except for the cross-compiler, so these should be fine. I hear gcc-for-host/gcc-for-build packages will improve the cross-compiling situation, but IIRC this needs someone to work on it or review the existing work. http://crossqa.debian.net/ https://wiki.debian.org/CrossCompiling > 3) Bootstrappable builds. As I understand it from idling on their IRC channel, the Bootstrappable Builds folks aim to not rely on all the non-source files and other cruft in tarballs, so bootstrapping from VCS seems like it should work just as well. I think it would be great if Debian could become bootstrappable, probably starting with the higher levels of the build stack (things like java) rather than the lower levels from bare-metal to Linux/GCC, which are still in progress by the Bootstrappable Builds folks. -- bye, pabs https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
