Re: Updates on RedHat 7.1/mips

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@mvista.com>]

On Wed, Jul 18, 2001 at 03:26:31PM +0200, Ralf Baechle wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 18, 2001 at 09:13:20AM +0200, Carsten Langgaard wrote:
> 
> > It look like there is a cross dependence, the build of tcsh failed with the
> > following message:
> > 
> > /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.7250: /usr/bin/perl: No such file or directory
> > error: Bad exit status from /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.7250 (pbuild)
> > 
> > So tcsh is needed to build perl and perl is needed to build tcsh :-(
> 
> One of the reasons why I believe that the major Linux distributions are
> fundamentally flawed - their build process doesn't account for such
> dependencies.  Point for BSD.

Debian has been going to great lengths to fix this.  We're a great deal
of the way along, too - to the point where bringing up our complete
hppa and ia64 distributions (with the exception of a few
platform-specific tool bugs and some gcc-3.0 incompatibilities) was
really relatively painless for the vast majority of packages.  Only a
tiny subset of packages are assumed installed at build time if they
aren't explicitly listed.

> The escape from this circular dependency is to build those packages manually
> which may require cheating in the configure and build process a bit.  Or
> install them from a binary package (which may require --nodeps and --force
> to install).  General rule therefore should be to only do such distribution
> package builds on systems which have a maximum installation.

Although I'm pretty sure that Debian's Perl package builds without the
use of tcsh... I've no idea where this is coming from.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz                           Carnegie Mellon University
MontaVista Software                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer