Revisiting RPM Package Management [LWN.net]

Revisiting RPM Package Management

Posted Sep 18, 2003 22:26 UTC (Thu) by hazelsct (subscriber, #3659)
In reply to: Revisiting RPM Package Management by rjw
Parent article: Revisiting RPM Package Management

You mean like Debian already has?

apt-get build-dep packagename

will automatically download the package's source, along with all of the packages necessary to build it, and then build the package. It always works, because if it doesn't, it's a release-critical bug, and the package is excluded from the subsequent stable release. Such strictness is crucial in Debian because packages for the ten non-i386 architectures are built this way.

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Revisiting RPM Package Management

Posted Sep 25, 2003 7:40 UTC (Thu) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

From the apt-get manpage:

       build-dep
              build-dep causes apt-get to install/remove packages in an attempt to
              satisfy the build dependencies for a source packages. Right now vir-
              tual package build depends choose a package at random.

Is the provided documentation incorrect?

My reading is that apt-get build-dep simply gets the build requirements for a package, without building or installing it. This is also my experience.

In order to actually build and/or install a package, dpkg-buildpackage may be used directly, or it may be invoked by the third-party apt addon tool apt-build, which is not part of the base apt distribution.

Without this addon, one must use the strangely phrased 'apt-get source <packagename>' which sadly spews several files into the current directory, and then manually invoke the dpkg-buildpackage tool to generate debs which may be then installed with dpkg. Unfortunately, these packages will be considered nonpreferentially to the standard packages by apt, which will simply "upgrade" them to the nonlocally generated versions. I have yet to discover a nice solution to this sticky bit. Putting the pakages on hold is not to my liking.

-josh