Comments on: Unreasonably Large Source Packages

By: Joe Buck

Joe Buck — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:48:54 +0000

Hi Russell,

As shipped by upstream, GCC is available in smaller packages. If you’re just interested in patching libstdc++, you’d only need to download the gcc-core and gcc-g++ pieces, and you can skip the most time-consuming step (building Java and its libraries).

However, the pieces that add on to gcc-core don’t correspond to independent source packages in the sense of dpkg or rpm.

By: Jonathan Wakely

Jonathan Wakely — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:56:05 +0000

Oops, that should be -–disable-bootstrap not dootstrap!

By: Jonathan Wakely

Jonathan Wakely — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:55:29 +0000

I use –disable-dootstrap when I only want to build and test libstdc++ rather than bootstrap the C compiler.

There is no reason why you should build the ObjC and Fortran compilers, just use –enable-languages=c,c++

By: etbe

etbe — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:00:05 +0000

Jon: That’s an interesting concept. The problem is that probably very few source packages which have multiple binary packages would be set up for this (IE having split dependencies for the different parts). It could be solved but I’m not sure how much traction it would get with the DDs.

Really this sort of thing needs to be done upstream.

By: Jon

Jon — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:00:32 +0000

I think, where possible, it would be nice to have some standard procedure in Debian packages with 1:many source:binary targets where you can do subset-builds when you are only interested in testing one of the binary outputs. Also a way of separating out the build-dependencies for the various binary targets. Apart from GCC, apps with large documentation and huge documentation toolchain dependencies come to mind.