Re: Debian and Ubuntu packages - 2015/06/03

[Svetlana A. Tkachenko]

These things are largely obvious and useless, as talking about them is easier 
than doing them...

Riccardo Mottola wrote:
> As Philippe wrote: packaging is a non-rewarding, terrible job. Debian 
> Packages are already quite debatable due to packaging choices that were 
> imposed (the way they are split up and packaged, for example). Making 
> things even more difficult because of a compiler switch would be unwise.

I think (may be wrong) that this is about as hard as adding clang as a 
dependency, and writing a clang makefile instead of gcc makefile. Not much of a 
pain in the end, but much pain initially because of the need to go through all 
packages and making sure that they compile and work correctly.

Riccardo Mottola wrote:
> The best would be of course if code could co-operate, since at one point 
> certain applications will require clang: people write code for its 
> features. What then?

This already is the case, as all Etoile apps are oriented towards clang since 
at least around 2009 from what I could see. People who would like to use these 
apps end up having no source of tested .deb packages.

Unless my understanding is wrong we could give the scripts to the Debian people 
(http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-gnustep-maintainers) for 
them to begin the move from gcc to clang. There is a 
http://www.aiei.ch/gnustep/ project but it hosts its repos somewhere else if 
I'm not mistaken and I do not see a reason to not rely on the debian 
repositories.

-- 
Svetlana