Subject: Re: 1.2 source archive and packaging issues

From: Rob Browning <[email-masked]>
Date: 17 Jun 1996 11:17:03 -0500

[email-masked] (Erick Branderhorst) writes:

> I don't think it can be done this way, because a lot of makefiles are
> organized in a way that they require the installer to be root at the
> moment of installation, or am I misinformed? 
> Perhaps fooling install might be an option?

What do you mean by "require the installer".  We don't use "make
install" for the final install anyway, and if you're worried about the
tools that are installing into debian-tmp, as long as the maintainer
makes sure to modify any references to "root" to something safe (like
`whoami`), then we won't care.  Either that or if the make file uses
"install" for installations, you just change

INSTALLER=install

to 

INSTALLER=dummy-installer

and of course we provide a dummy-installer that just copies the file
to debian-tmp, and adds the owner and permissions requested to a file
that will be used at package install time to actually set these
values.

So, to recap, all the files would still get installed into debian-tmp
so that the right directory heirarchy would be preserved, and then an
accompanying file debian.filestats or something would be created,
containing all the information about how to set the appropriate owners
and groups at package install time.

This file, debian.filestats, would either be created by the
maintainer, or outomatically generated by dummy installers (or even a
combination of the two).  I was also thinking that the filestats file
could have special tags for man, binary, etc. that just tell the
debian installer to "do the right thing" at package install time --
tell it to give the indicated files the current preferred Debian
permissions and ownerships for that type of file.  Something like
(from a mythical debian.filestats):

/usr/bin/* type:binary
/usr/man/* type:man
/usr/lib/gimp/*.xpm 644 root.root
/usr/doc/gimp/* type:documentation

or whatever.

Reasonable?
--
Rob

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 1996 20:58:53 +0200 (MET DST)

> install" for the final install anyway, and if you're worried about the
I use make install in a lot of the packages I maintain because this is the 
closest to the mainstream installation. And we want to provide users the
most close to mainstream installation but then better.

[deleted stuff about dummy-installer]
> Reasonable?
Makes a lot of sense to me, can you hack install to do such a thing?

"Unix: 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof"
                                                                D.E. Knuth
Erick Branderhorst  http://www.iaehv.nl/users/branderh/

---

From: Rob Browning <[email-masked]>
Date: 17 Jun 1996 15:46:26 -0500

> Makes a lot of sense to me, can you hack install to do such a thing?

You mean actually modify the source for /usr/bin/install itself so we
have a new install that's Debian specific, I'd be really nervous about
that.  But if you mean either writing a substitute program that could
be used when building packages, no problem.  In fact I'd probably just
write a wrapper (perl) script that looks at the args, handles the mode
and owner flags itself (as mentioned earlier), and then calls the
normal install for the rest of the job (stripping, copying, etc).

Should be pretty easy.

--
Rob

---

From: Erick Branderhorst <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Jun 1996 09:25:00 +0100

> normal install for the rest of the job (stripping, copying, etc).
probably better that way, I would like to test the script when you wrote it,
Erick

---

From: Rob Browning <[email-masked]>
Date: 18 Jun 1996 10:36:50 -0500

Erick Branderhorst <[email-masked]> writes:

Does anyone else have any opinions about this issue?  We (Erick and I)
have been babbling on about this, and I didn't know if everyone else's
silence was a lack of interest or a general agreement.  i.e. Is this
something that people think is worth working on?  If so, I'll probably
give it a try.

--
Rob

---

From: [email-masked] (Bruce Perens)
Date: Tue, 18 Jun 96 12:43 PDT

I think we should look at adapting the src.rpm format to debian's needs, but
I haven't investigated it enough to know how practical an idea that is.

	Bruce