On 16 April 2016 at 19:20, Niko Tyni <nt...@debian.org> wrote: > For a long time, src:perl has had some limited support for bootstrapping a > new architecture without /usr/bin/perl. We've gone to quite some trouble > to avoid needing perl to build perl as far as possible, including quite > a few sed scripts and a 600-line monstrous debian/rules file so we don't > need debhelper. However, things like dpkg-shlibdeps and dpkg-gencontrol > which are required for building .deb packages are #!/usr/bin/perl scripts, > so this is arguably somewhat ineffective.
This was added at the request of porters in 2001 or so. I can't find anything in my mail archives from the time, so I suspect that the conversation was on IRC and would guess one of ia64 or hppa which were the ports in flight around that time. Initially I just included a subset of debhelper, which I updated periodically to break a circular build-dependency b/w perl and debhelper, but eventually removed the debhelper bits entirely, and arranged debian/rules such that perl was not used at all until perl.static was available, and checkperl was run prior to any indirect execution (dpkg-shlibdeps, dpkg-gencontrol) with instructions to make those work: in hindsight, those could have probably been silently handled by executing them using the built perl.static. At the time this was definitely tested in a chroot, but skimming the rules file now I can see that there are places where stuff has crept in: use of dpkg-architecture and dpkg-parsechangelog stick out immediately. > So if we started to build-depend on debhelper and therefore transitively > perl, would anybody actually care? I'm fairly confident that there would be complaints if you made that change: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianBootstrap https://wiki.debian.org/CircularBuildDependencies This looks interesting though: https://wiki.debian.org/BuildProfileSpec It appears that it may be possible to do something like this: Package: perl-stage1 Build-Profiles: <stage1> Architecture: any ... Package: perl-base Build-Profiles: <!stage1> Architecture: any Conflicts: perl-stage1 Replaces: perl-stage1 ... similarly add "Build-Profiles: <!stage1>" to all other packages. Then change debian/rules to contain: ifneq ($(filter stage1,$(DEB_BUILD_PROFILES)),) include debian/rules.stage1 else include debian/rules.standard endif debian/rules.standard would contain what debian/rules does now, but cleaned up to use debhelper. A basic debian/rules.stage1 is attached. It's not particularly pretty, but appears to work and shouldn't need to change much. I presume that once all of this is done, debhelper can then depend on "perl | perl-stage1", which would allow the normal perl packages to build-depend on debhelper. Looping in Wookey who from the authorship of some of those documents may be able to add more knowledgeable suggestions. --bod
rules.stage1
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