HAL 0.5.10

[Sjoerd Simons]

On Mon, Oct 15, 2007 at 02:12:04PM +0200, Danny Kukawka wrote:
> On Montag, 15. Oktober 2007, Sjoerd Simons wrote:
> > On Sun, Oct 14, 2007 at 02:57:49PM +0200, Danny Kukawka wrote:
> [...]
> > > The hal-info package need a HAL >= 0.5.10 due to new fdi-directives
> > > (*_outof) which wouldn't work with older HAL versions. It make no sense
> > > to use this hal-info version with hal =< 0.5.10 since you would lose many
> > > of the fdi-rules.
> >
> > Still having configure doing check for things that only matter at runtime
> > is a bad practise IMHO. A warning instead of abort would be okay. But with
> > the current check, we can't create the hal-info packages without hal, which
> > is quite annoying.
> 
> This is nothing new. You couldn't build all features of the package (e.g. 
> KillSwitch feature) without HAL before. It make simply no sense to build 
> hal-info for systems with older HAL versions. Do you have a build system 
> without minimal install which didn't contain HAL? 

A debian build system really is very minimal chroot with some basic build
environment (just gcc, make, libc-dev etc). All other stuff gets pulled in as
needed by the declared build-depends. 

Needing to pull in hal just to satisfy this check is basically a waste of time
and resources. And it doesn't help anyways as the build system is never going
to be the system on which the package is actually installed/used on.

  Sjoerd
-- 
Nondeterminism means never having to say you are wrong.