INSTALL and buildprep

[Eric S. Raymond]

Hal Murray <hmurray at megapathdsl.net>:
>esr at thyrsus.com said:
>> Right now we have one action (pull all dependencies from the platform's
>> package manager) and no switches.  What switches and actions need to be
>> added?
>
>show about to be installed files

Well, that's a problem - because that set can vary depending on what
switches you specify at waf configure time, which is a later stage.

I think you'd best scratch this one and resign yoursef to doing installs
into scratch directories to see that list.

>without tools, tools only
>run only

Is this meant to be a list of configurations you want supported?

Without tools is presumably ntpd only.

Does 'tools' include ntpviz?

>print stuff in a human friendly format
>  needed to check the database
>  needed for new OSes/Distros

Print what stuff?

> > tag required packages with the feature that requires them
> 
> Or maybe only tell me about the packages needed for a specific configuration.

That is doable.

> There is a chicken/egg problem with waf.  It won't configure unless the 
> header files and libraries are available.
> 
> There is also the cross build area.  Tell me what I need to build for a 
> specified environment.

Yeah, that I have no idea how to tackle.  The problem is that we don't
know the target environment will be using the same package manager 
as the build environment.

> Does buildbot have a crossbuild case?  Say building for a Raspberry Pi on an 
> Intel platform.

Not that I know of.  But none of our expert buildbot wranglers is me.
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