[Distutils] An observation on how system packagers and developers can be friends

[Maurits van Rees]

Op 29-10-10 00:49, Glyph Lefkowitz schreef:
> On Oct 28, 2010, at 6:08 PM, Tres Seaver wrote:
>
>> Heh, agreed. That bites me on about every third machine I set up for
>> the first time. The Usual Suspects (TM) are whatever the local
>> packaging system calls the following (and their -dev or -devel packages,
>> if split out):
>>
>> - - zlib
>> - - ncurses
>> - - bz2
>> - - readline
>> - - openssl
>
> On Debian, there's a handy shortcut: 'apt-get build-dep', which will
> install the build dependencies for any given source package. So 'apt-get
> build-dep python' will get you all set to build Python.

I did not know that one yet, thanks.  I tried that on Ubuntu Jaunty.  It 
returns rather a lot:

$ sudo apt-get build-dep --dry-run python
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
   debhelper debiandoc-sgml doc-base dvipdfmx ed gettext ghostscript 
gsfonts html2text intltool-debian lacheck latex-beamer latex-xcolor 
libcompress-raw-zlib-perl
   libcompress-zlib-perl libcroco3 libcups2 libcupsimage2 
libfreezethaw-perl libgs8 libhtml-parser-perl libhtml-tagset-perl 
libhtml-tree-perl libice6
   libio-compress-base-perl libio-compress-zlib-perl libkpathsea4 
libmail-sendmail-perl libmldbm-perl libpaper-utils libpaper1 libpoppler4 
libroman-perl libsgmls-perl
   libsm6 libsp1c2 libsys-hostname-long-perl libtext-format-perl 
libtiff4 libuuid-perl libxaw7 libxext6 libxmu6 libxt6 lmodern pgf 
po-debconf preview-latex-style prosper
   ps2eps psfontmgr python-docutils python-roman sgml-base sgml-data 
sgmlspl sp tex-common texinfo texlive-base texlive-base-bin 
texlive-base-bin-doc texlive-common
   texlive-doc-base texlive-extra-utils texlive-fonts-recommended 
texlive-fonts-recommended-doc texlive-generic-extra 
texlive-generic-recommended texlive-humanities
   texlive-humanities-doc texlive-latex-base texlive-latex-base-doc 
texlive-latex-extra texlive-latex-extra-doc texlive-latex-recommended 
texlive-latex-recommended-doc
   texlive-pictures texlive-pictures-doc texlive-pstricks 
texlive-pstricks-doc tipa xml-core
0 upgraded, 83 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded.


Somehow I doubt that I need TeX to build python.  (La)TeX is wonderful 
but there are limits to what it can do. :-)  I can imagine it might be 
needed for building a .deb package though, so it probably makes sense.



-- 
Maurits van Rees
Programmer, Zest Software