ABS vs traditional way

new2arch · 2008-04-01 20:15:28

Hi all!

I was wondering whether using the ABS-system would make any difference in how successfully it would manage to build from source when a manual attempt to compile from source failed?

For example, building Truecrypt 5 from source was a success on Arch-box no.1 but failed miserably on Arch-box no.2 for reasons unknown (at least for me!). My immediate suspicion is that a general system upgrade/update did something to my box that made gcc or make or something else quite unstable or incompatible. The box I successfully compiled the software on was in fact slightly "older" than the box the identical compile session failed.**

I have read up some on the ABS-system but until now I was reluctant to use it since all software I needed could be easily grabbed via Pacman.
I'm not afraid of learning something new (hey I'm using Arch!) but don't ask me why, sometimes I'm little lazy or perhaps afraid that something would break. That, though, is another discussion!

**Which leads me into the next question: how do you guys (and ladies) do when you have to be away from your arch-system for, say, a fortnight or even weeks? A bunch of new updates for core and extra are generally available every day and I'm making myself busy couple of times a week adding stuff in pacman.conf - denying stuff that I don't want to be updated. For now, I'm pretty happy with not having to have the most bleeding edge unless an update brings several benefits to an application that I would appreciate. But I would of course want to enjoy the security updates.
I can only imagine what'd happen if I had to be away for a couple of weeks!
Hundreds of packages to browse through... :-O

Being glued in front of the computer 365 isn't realistic although that is exactly what would make me happy as a clam.

And please don't suggest I should consider changing my distro because I enjoy Arch very much!

- Sorry, this was a lengthy post -

Last edited by new2arch (2008-04-01 20:17:52)

tomk · 2008-04-01 20:31:22

Re the question in your topic: if it doesn't compile the 'traditional' way, it won't compile in ABS either.

Re your example: TC5 does not build with gcc 4.3.

If you have to leave your system out-of-date for a while, prepare for the eventual upgrade by reading Arch news items for the period concerned, and browsing the forum/MLs for any issues that may have arisen. Pay close attention to pacman's output during the upgrade, and action anything mentioned there.

new2arch · 2008-04-02 06:19:10

tomk wrote:

Re the question in your topic: if it doesn't compile the 'traditional' way, it won't compile in ABS either.
Re your example: TC5 does not build with gcc 4.3.
If you have to leave your system out-of-date for a while, prepare for the eventual upgrade by reading Arch news items for the period concerned, and browsing the forum/MLs for any issues that may have arisen. Pay close attention to pacman's output during the upgrade, and action anything mentioned there.

Hi Tom.

Re: compiling issue - Then I don't have any choice than trying to downgrade gcc 4.3 to say gcc34 3.4.6-1?
Thing is, I tried to uninstall the gcc 4.x version but many applications seem to be depending on this particular version. I'll give it a shot again later on. Also, I recall the 'readme' file in Trucrypt suggested gcc 4x is needed but perhaps I've mistaken.
Anyway, thanks for pinpointing the source of the compiling problem specifically for TC 5.

Re: Update and upgrade issue - I agree. Also, I realized that checking out secunia.com once in a while would certainly give valuable guidance on deciding whether an existing update is security related or not.
This question has probably been asked before, but what about an additional Arch repo that only harbors security updates? I'm certainly not in position for suggesting these things considering an additional repo would demand
restructuring the infrastructure and probably other things as well, but it'd be a convenient solution though.
But then again, Arch is a bleeding distro!

Thanks again,

Last edited by new2arch (2008-04-02 06:26:52)

Allan · 2008-04-02 06:27:36

gcc34 will install along side the current gcc. But you could downgrade to gcc4.2 (you will find packages on this really outdated mirror: ftp://ftp.belnet.be/mirror/archlinux.org). A quick search found no package that required gcc>=4.3.0 anywhere in the abs tree

People have proposed a stable Arch Linux branch - there actually seems to be some progress on this (see http://www.freelists.org/list/archlinux-stable)

new2arch · 2008-04-02 06:35:49

Allan wrote:

gcc34 will install along side the current gcc. But you could downgrade to gcc4.2 (you will find packages on this really outdated mirror: ftp://ftp.belnet.be/mirror/archlinux.org). A quick search found no package that required gcc>=4.3.0 anywhere in the abs tree
People have proposed a stable Arch Linux branch - there actually seems to be some progress on this (see http://www.freelists.org/list/archlinux-stable)

Thanks Allan for the link and the tip! I'll attempt a gcc downgrade later when I get back home.
Wouldn't the old version still be in my pacman cache as long as I didn't delete all old packages?

As for the stable Arch branch, would this solution be equivalent or similar to the Debian-way?

Allan · 2008-04-02 06:55:15

new2arch wrote:

Thanks Allan for the link and the tip! I'll attempt a gcc downgrade later when I get back home.
Wouldn't the old version still be in my pacman cache as long as I didn't delete all old packages?

It should be.

new2arch wrote:

As for the stable Arch branch, would this solution be equivalent or similar to the Debian-way?

No idea. I have paid it only the briefest of attention. I believe there is a wiki page describing the goals and implementation.

Arch Linux

#1 2008-04-01 20:15:28

ABS vs traditional way

#2 2008-04-01 20:31:22

Re: ABS vs traditional way

#3 2008-04-02 06:19:10

Re: ABS vs traditional way

#4 2008-04-02 06:27:36

Re: ABS vs traditional way

#5 2008-04-02 06:35:49

Re: ABS vs traditional way

#6 2008-04-02 06:55:15

Re: ABS vs traditional way

Board footer