Re: Bug with pkg if only a single file is installed

[Søren Hauberg]

tor, 14 09 2006 kl. 15:34 +0200, skrev David Bateman:
> Ok, I'll make the change you suggest.
Okay

> I've also identified another
> problem. Shouldn't we copy COPYING to <package>/packinfo? This caused me
> a issue for the RPMs in that I created a binary octave package from the
> installed package by copying all of the files to either <package>/ or
> <package>/inst, and as COPYING was missing the binary package failed to
> install. Making that modification to pkg.m I now have an automatic rpm
> build process from the DESCRIPTION files, at least for packages that
> don't have external dependencies.
Wow, this is great news. Now we need .deb and windows support. I don't
know anything about either these, but I assume .deb is fairly similar
to .rpm. For windows I guess we could build packages and ship them as
Octave packages. We could also just ignore the Windows platform when it
comes to binary packages.

> Thinking about the issue of external dependencies, there is a problem
> with the DESCRIPTION files as they stand. Basically I want to use the
> SystemRequirements: field of the DESCRIPTIONS file to automatically
> generate the external build dependencies for the package. The problem is
> that the package names for certain functionality is not uniform across
> distributions. For example libtermcap on fedora seems to be libtermcap2
> on mandriva, etc. Therefore it seems to me that the SystemRequirements:
> field of DESCRIPTIONS is not enough.
> 
> I see two choices. We could replace the SystemRequirements field with
> multiple fields with names like "Fedora:", "Mandriva:", "Debian:", etc.
> Alternatively we might modify the dependencies in SystemRequirements: to
> be something like
> 
> SystemRequirements: [Fedora]libtermcap (> 2.0.6), [Mandriva]libtermcap2
> (> 2.0.6)
> 
> to allow distribution specific requirements. Furthermore, we might have
> different build and install dependencies and how to we treat these with
> the current scheme. Any thought on how to address this?
I've been thinking about the issue for a long time (I haven't really
found a good solution). SystemRequirements is basicly there to help
automatic creation of .rpm and .deb files. Another solution than the
ones you suggested would be to have 

FedoraSystemRequirements: libtermcap (> 2.0.6)
MandrivaSystemRequirements: libtermcap2 (> 2.0.6)

I guess that would be more easy to parse. Then the SystemRequirements
field would be for all other distributions than those that have
specialized fields.

pkg.m doesn't really care which fields are in the DESCRIPTION file, so
the above solution doesn't require any changes to pkg.m. The same is
also true for the other solutions since the SystemRequirements field
isn't handled by pkg.m.

So, I have thoughts, but I don't have great thoughts :-)

Søren