dc9 - 0.5
DebConf9
| Speakers | |
|---|---|
|
Simon Richter |
| Schedule | |
|---|---|
| Day | DebConf day 5 / Conference dinner (2009-07-28) |
| Room | BOF room - no video |
| Start time | 20:00 |
| Duration | 01:00 |
| Info | |
| ID | 422 |
| Event type | lecture |
| Track | DebConf Unofficial |
| Language | en |
| Feedback | |
|---|---|
|
Did you attend this event? Give Feedback |
xcontrol
A framework for extending control file syntax that allows compilation of policy-compliant control files from the extended variant is presented, and common use cases (embedded Debian, backports, toolchain packages) are discussed.
The control file format is designed to be purely descriptive, with only minimal text substitution functions. While this is generally a good design approach, it significantly limits reuse of source packages across different distributions. There are three major use cases that are not handled at present:
- backports: after an ABI change, it is desirable to use a versioned build-dependency in sid to force buildds to use a version after the change, while a backport might want to use the old ABI in order to pull in less new packages
- embedded Debian: for cross-compilation, build dependencies need to be split between host and target side dependencies, which is not supported in Debian
- toolchain packages: these packages need to be compiled multiple times for different target architectures, while Debian requires all built binary packages to be listed in the control file.
The xcontrol framework handles these by allowing the format to be extended in a modular way, and allows developers to generate a policy compliant control file.