[systemd-devel] setting up to allow separate udev and systemd builds

[Robert Schwebel]

Olav,

On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 03:25:09PM +0200, Olav Vitters wrote:
> > Yes really. This is about the end user of the distro. Which means
> > comparing installing packages.
>
> It is only needed during the build, so don't see what you're getting
> at. Install when needed, remove after.

You miss the use case.

When I'm working on a board support package for an embedded system,
*building* the rootfs (distro) is my usecase *as an embedded developer*.
So I do this several times a day. There is no build server or distro
provider where it doesn't matter if it spends some cpu cycles on some
big datacenter machine. Building the distro happens all the time here on
my laptop, and thus waisting time happens all the time.

Currently, the workflow would be like this:

1)  build other components
2a) build prerequisites necessary for systemd, which are otherwhise
    unneeded; this needs to be installed into the local sysroot in
    order to let systemd pick up the prerequisites
2b) build systemd+udev
2c) somehow remove the "wrong" components from sysroot again, as
    all the rest of the system is not allowed to see them (otherwhise
    their configure scripts would assume the features to be there)
2d) install only udev
3)  move on

Instead of:

1) build other components
2) configure with just the right switches, make
3) move on

In ptxdist, we have 700+ packages which don't need this kind of special
handling (especially 2c will really be a pain). And all this because of
something which can be solved in configure.ac.

Note: This discussion shouldn't be about if source distributions are a
valid use case. Fact is that there are source distributions and people
have their reasons to use them. And all source distributions have this
issue. We should avoid that everyone implements his own uggly
workaround.

rsc
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