[Openmcl-devel] A Debian packaging update and an outstanding issue

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

Faheem Mitha <faheem at faheem.info> writes:

> CCL is not currently in Debian. Debian's archives only consists of
> software compiled by Debian on Debian. So, how can CCL initially enter
> Debian? It needs to, at least initially, use software compiled outside
> Debian. My current version of the packaging builds CCL using a heap
> image downloaded from clozure.com. I put the heap image in a package
> called ccl-bootstrap. This package may never make it into the Debian
> archives, but something like it is needed to compile CCL
> initially. Once 1.8 is in Debian, the package build dependencies can
> be switched to use 1.8 to compile 1.8.

You could instrument ccl with my all new stepper package, trace its
processing while compiling itself, reformat the output to make it even
more "human readable" (or modify my stepper to produce this nicer output
directly).  This would make a procedure that a human could execute to
produce the initial debian ccl binary. 

An alternative would be to have a human just interpret the ccl source
code to compile ccl itself, but it may be too complex, therefore too
error risky.  The first procedure would have more step, but they'd be
simplier steps.

You could write a new target for ccl, that would produce C code instead
of binary code.  Make a cross compilation to that target, and have
debian people compile that C code with the gcc compiler the compiled by
had as described in the first procedure above.  They did that once upon
a time, didn't they?

Because if they never did that, I'm afraid debian may be compromised:
http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf


> The phrase "slightly older and compatible" is vague. 

Try to compile gcc 4.5 with gcc 1.0.


-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/
A bad day in () is better than a good day in {}.