Re: [Helidelinux-devel] Package manager

[Bennett T. <be...@ra...>]

2004-03-16T19:35:59 Hui Zhou:
> BTW, as the work in LFS project indicate, the host tool chain can play
> an important roles, how redhat or debian manage this problem?

As far as I know, current package managers simply ignore this
problem. Instead, they use their own distro, and ignore the
[typically minor] updates in the toolchain over the life of a single
major build. E.g. rpm documents the build date and build host, and
leaves actual documenting of the details of the build chain to the
users' ability to query what that system was running at that time.
In practice, most people segregate binary packages into e.g. Red
Hat 9, RHEL3, Fedora Core 1, etc., and keep them consistent with
their build chains, the build chains being those that came with that
release of Linux. I suspect Debian does much the same.

I'm planning on tackling it when I add dependency management to bpm,
by ensuring that the build script fragment is run under something
like "strace -f -eexecve -efile" or thereabouts, and including build
dependancies on every package containing any file referenced in the
strace output. The result won't be true build dependancies (which I
can't think of any way of robustly automating); e.g. a lot of
packages on my build system will come up with dependencies against
coreutils and bash, that would be satisfied as well by Busybox.
Instead, the dependancies I'll compute will (a) document _exactly_
how the package was built, for reproduceability, and (b) be useful
for offering suggestions about what might help if a rebuild attempt
fails.

-Bennett