[Yast4debian-devel] yast4debian, going ahead

[Jaldhar H. Vyas]

On Sun, 3 Apr 2005, Ramon Acedo wrote:

> Jaldhar packaged the base packages to start working on the modules.
> Great job! I will try to send an email commenting some dependencies
> which should be added to some of the packages.
>

Yes please do.  I am going to rebuild all the packages under pbuilder
which will catch any mistakes in build dependencies but for install
dependencies, the best way is to install the packages on clean systems and
see what breaks.

Also more work needs to be done to make the packages Debian policy
compliant and the newly ported modules need to be packaged.

> People who want to compile some YaST2 modules for Debian can still
> follow the howto from almost the end, Jaldhar's packages are probably
> the difficult-to-compile ones so come on, we encourage you to try it out
> and give feedback!
>
> Pikota is working hard in the dark and almost every day has news to
> me :-) He is preparing patches to start using some modules.
>
> He's asked me to write to the list to ask your opinion about the
> matter I comment below.
>
> There are some possible approaches to work on the yast2-packagemanager:
>
> 1 - Do-it-all approach: rewrite entirely yast2-packagemanager using
>     libapt where there is rpm stuff.
>

This is probably the cleanest way in the long term or it will create
maintainence headaches.  But in the short term we can use a different
approach.

> 2 - Just-what-needed approach: Don't touch yast2-packagemanager, just
>     hacking on the library Requires.ycp and what it depends on. As you
>     know most packages need to check whether a specific package is
>     installed or not. This kind of operations are done through calls
>     like Pkg::PkgInstall. This approach would go through this file
>     and replace things like:
>     SCR::Execute (.target.bash, "rpm -q " + package);
>     by
>     SCR::Execute (.target.bash, "dpkg -l" + package);
>     or
>     SCR::Execute (.target.bash, "rpm -Uvh " + package);
>     by
>     SCR::Execute (.target.bash, "apt-get install -y " + package);
>
>     But probably some equivalencies would be tricky.
>     I hope to be clear enough :-)
>
> 3 - Ray approach (in terms of speed): Do not do anything, well actualy
>     almost anything. We would proceed as in the 2nd approach but instead of
>     looking for the apt alternative just show messages to the user telling
>     things like "Portmap is not installed, please install it by hand and
>     try again later".
>

> Pikota and me agree and we'd choose right now the 3rd approach which find
> more sensible in terms of letting it just work and focus on trying to port
> some other modules.
>
> What do you think guys?
>

I would prefer 2 myself but you are doing the work :-)



-- 
Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar@debian.org>
La Salle Debain - http://www.braincells.com/debian/