[Pkg-julia-devel] Julia 0.6

[Peter Colberg]

On Fri, Jul 07, 2017 at 05:14:53PM +0200, Graham Inggs wrote:
> On 06/07/2017 03:36, Peter Colberg wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> After some pondering here, I think this might not actually be a problem.
> Surely we can generate the documentation after building the new julia
> binary, and using the new julia binary?  In which case julia will not need
> to build-depend on julia.

I am more concerned about a julia build-dependency of the module
packages. For modules with a test suite, we surely want to run tests
during the build process. Suppose one of the modules must be updated
to the latest version to build the julia documentation, and that
module’s test suite happens to require the latest julia version, then
we have a circular dependency. The chain could be broken manually by
building that module with DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=nocheck and uploading
source and binary, but that is a nuissance avoided with a separate
julia-doc source package.

By the way, since we are discussing source packages, what do you think
of having a proper source package and -dev binary package (with static
library only) for Julia’s fork of libuv? That would allow us to use
the upstream julia tarball (maybe with "Files-Excluded: doc/*" in
debian/copyright for automatic repacking using uscan), and avoid
patching deps/libuv.mk (which was modified again in julia 0.6).

Peter