[Aptitude-devel] Unable to compile aptitude from git

[Axel Beckert]

Hi,

trying to answer what I know. The remainder is probably better
answered by Daniel Hartwig or someone else with a better overview over
Aptitude's code than me.

berenger.morel at neutralite.org wrote:
> > As for every other package, ensure that you have a deb-src line in
> > your sources.list matching the deb line the package is coming from
> > and execute:
> >
> > apt-get build-dep aptitude
> >
> > It should install all needed packages to build the package from
> > source.
> 
> To be honest, I did not did it, for a more or less valid reason:
> there were a lot of things needed, that I am not able to see why
> they should be needed.

Unfortunately that's not a valid reason. ;-)

> An example is elinks, a ncurse web browser ( and without development
> package concerning it ).

It's used to convert HTML files to plain text. See doc/html-to-text.

> There were also things that aptitude does not seems to depends,

It's very common that there is more software needed to build a program
than to use it, especially if a program has a test-suite, because
there are usually additional programs needed to run the tests. Another
common reason is building documentation from sources.

> when I look into what aptitude says about aptitude's dependencies,
> like python-dev

It's libboost-python-dev which pulls in python-dev.

I must admit I wasn't able to find the reason for this
build-dependency immediately and the versioning control history
doesn't reach as far back as when this was added. So I tried to build
aptitude without this build-dependency to see where it fails... Did
that with the current version of Aptitude in Debian Unstable.

It indeed builds without the libboost-python-dev build-dependency and
even the resulting file lists dependencies of the resulting binary
package show no relevant differences. I suspect this is a relict from
the times where also an Aptitude GUI was built.

Daniel: Can you cross-check if I'm right with above observations and
if so, remove that build-dependency?

> (and I just checked anew, even in aptitude's dependencies
> there are no python dependency). But I do not know how build-dep
> works in it's internals, so I may be wrong anyway.

Basically, the Build-Depends in debian/control lists all packages
_necessary_ to build the package properly -- except those which are
already a dependency of the package build-essential or of priority
"required".

"apt-get build-dep" or "aptitude build-dep" look up this list and
install everything in that list (and its dependencies) which is not
already installed. It's that simple.

> I already did some installation the same way as I did, and
> everything was fine.

Sometimes some build-dependencies are optional, but if they're
missing, the built packages has not all features it should have. This
often affects stuff like GNOME or KDE support or supporting one or
more image formats.

> At least, I had some dependency errors, but was able to fix them
> easily by reading the output.

Actually you don't have to do that. The package maintainer already did
that and wrote the result into the above mentioned Build-Depends
header.

> I just installed the aptitude build-dep stuff, and have exactly the
> same result, still against the git repo.

I can confirm that though. Looks like some Boost incompatibility with
the current boost version. I suspect the fix of 0.6.8.2-1.2 is missing
in Git.

Daniel, can you answer that one more precisely?

> > As this is a aptitude specific question I would suggest following
> > up on aptitude-devel at lists.alioth.debian.org as they can probably
> > help better with more specific problems than deity@ can.
> 
> Sorry for that, I did not found it on the wiki page
> http://lists.debian.org/devel.html,

(JFTR: That's no wiki page.)

The page is maintained by the Debian List Masters and includes only
lists on lists.debian.org -- Aptitude's mailing list is a list which
belongs to the project Aptitude on Alioth (alioth.debian.org, Debian's
instance of a SourceForge-alike system), and Alioth's lists
independent of those lists hosted on lists.debian.org. (Yes, this may
be not obvious. Just explaining.)

		Regards, Axel
-- 
 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert <abe at debian.org>, http://people.debian.org/~abe/
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