[Pkg-julia-devel] Julia 0.6

[Peter Colberg]

On Wed, Jul 05, 2017 at 12:47:20AM -0400, Peter Colberg wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 02, 2017 at 03:51:55PM +0200, Graham Inggs wrote:
> > On 2 July 2017 at 01:35, Peter Colberg <peter at colberg.org> wrote:
> > > The documentation was converted to Markdown and requires a few Julia
> > > packages to build (see doc/REQUIRE).
> > 
> > Are you intending for julia to become a build-dependency of itself?
> > Or split the documentation off into a separate source package?
> 
> Julia module packages need not depend on julia if we use versioned
> module paths as suggested by upstream (but currently reverted by
> debian/patches/unversioned-system-load-path.patch). We could have a
> dh_julia that installs modules to the versioned path (and symlinks
> between multiple versioned paths to support multiple Julia versions).
> 
> That is the packaging model used for Lua modules, which I think would
> be a good fit for Julia, too. Since Julia 0.5, libjulia is installed
> as a system-wide library for the purpose of embedding, thus it should
> be possible to install Julia modules without the julia executable.

After a bit more pondering, this does not actually address your point
about the circular build dependency. Regardless of whether packages
depend on julia or not, those needed to build the documentation will
most likely have to be updated in lockstep with julia.

So yes, it seems advisable splitting the documentation into a separate
source package to avoid a bootstrapping issue with new major releases.

Peter