[M3devel] "how to build a distribution"

[hendrik at topoi.pooq.com]

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 04:49:41PM +0000, Jay K wrote:
> 
> On this matter there's actually more stuff worth mentioning.
>  
>  
> Like, you always need various packages/libraries/tools that are often not in default minimal OS installs.
>  
>  
> ODBC, X Windows, Postgres, bc, flex, bison, gcc, make, cvs, opengl, etc.
>  
>  
> None of those are in the default Debian netinst for example.
> And esp. the first few are not in many systems' default installations.

>From the Debian binary point of view,  the packages providing these 
should should be dependencies of the various libraries we generate that 
use them.  Installing our library would then cause the other tools to be 
installed automatically.

>  
> You don't need any of these, except for gcc basically, to use Modula-3.
> But if you want to include all of "std", you need the C headers and/or librarie (often just libraries).


Actually, Debian distinguishes several kind of packages:
  source packages -- the actual source code that people edit.
  binary packages -- what you need to use the software
       Usually executables and/or shared libraries
  doc -- often recommended or suggested by the binary packages and dev 
       packages
  dev packages -- what you need to develop other software that uses the 
       binary package. For C, this often consists of header files and 
       kind of shim libraries that serve no purpose except to load 
       the shared libraries.

In our case, the source package for cm3 will probably have a 
build-dependency on one of the binary packages it generates.  I wonder 
how C handles this.

And how does this map onto the files Modula 3 uses and builds?

-- hendrik