On Thu Feb 21, 2008 at 13:43:33 -0000, Vic wrote:
> >   I'd be impressed if that were the case.
> 
> Be impressed, then :-)
  :)
> Errr - but you can. You can express whatever dependencies you like.
    OK let me retry that then.  What I meant is that the is the 
   mismatch between saying these two things:
   * Package depends upon having /bin/sendmail
   * Pckage depends on having postfix
> The only time this will fail is when the dependency name changes between
> distributions such that you can't identify it on a particular platform.
  And that's where I've seen problems when it came to installing an
 RPM from SuSE upon a Cento machine.
> I either build on a deb-type box & convert to rpm, or build on an rpm-type
> box and convert to deb. That's the only feasible way to run this - and the
> latter means that I have to determine my real dependencies by hand, so
> it's not going to happen.
  It seems like either way you should build into a collection of 
 binaries, then have those be the input to the .rpm, or .deb, creation.
  (I'm not sure what kind of build environment you've got, but if
 you have a source tree and the ability to run 'make install
 prefix=/x/x/x/' then you'd be able to do that easily.)
> It's already packaged - but feel free to comment on what I've done if
> there are improvements to be made.
  Thanks.  I've grabbed the vxforth alpha9 package, and it looks 
 mostly OK.  You install a lib to /lib, and binaries to /usr/lib.
 Those binaries have no external dependencies beyond the expected:
 steve@steve:~/forth/usr/bin$ ldd vfxlin
         linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xffffe000)
         libdl.so.2 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libdl.so.2 (0xb7fb9000)
         libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6 (0xb7e88000)
         /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb7fca000)
  
  The first comment I'd have is the section 'alien' would be
 better marked as 'devel'  Patch /usr/share/perl5/Alien/Package/Deb.pm
 to do that.  (Should be configurable I'd agree.)
  Secondly you install documentation into two directories:
  /usr/share/doc/{vfxforth VfxForth}
  Pick one, and use that.
> That's a binary package.
  Sure.
> Well, I'd say that if the Policy Manual is being ignored, it is of limited
> use.
  More that the policies of a closed-source distributor aren't likely
 to match those of an open-source developer.
  My suggestion, now I fully understand things would be to build both
 .rpm + .deb packages from the binaries you produce.  And not build a
 Debian source package, just a binary one.  That is a debian/rules file
 pretty much consisting of moving the binary files into a given
 location.
  Having the source package, given that you don't want to distribute it
 would nice, but overkill.
Steve
-- 
http://www.steve.org.uk/