My plan for simplifying things while catering to various wishes is to
- remove pike7.8-full
- let pike7.8 Recommend all other packages. That way everything will be installed if you run apt-get install pike7.8 unless you have switched off automatic installation of recommended packages, but it's still possible to opt out of individual packages.
I have made a small set of patches which I'd like to be included in pike and debian packages in order to make the package emdebian (cross) compilable. I've attached the patches, but as described below there are still some caveats to them.
Patches according to http://wiki.debian.org/EmdebianMakefile Patches are made against the current debian package (pike 7.8.352).
1) Patch to debian/rules. This patch can be included as is. The patch makes it possible to use a cross compiler for compiling pike. (cross compiling in debian you can do using "pkg-build -a arm -uc -us)
2) Patch to src/configure.in This patch can be included as is into pike, I think this was is a bug in configure.in because it originally tries to use the newly build pike instead of the pike installed on the host.
3) Patch to src/configure I think this patch should ultimately be done in src/configure.in. But I'm no M4 expert and haven't yet found which changes need to be made in src/configure.in
4) Patch to src/modules/Mysql/configure I think this patch was already included in src/modules/Mysql/configure.in.
Then there is the issue of bytecompiling. As I understand it pike can do without byte-compiling. However the debian packaging copies the byte-compiled files into the several packages. If byte-compiling fails (because the newly build pike can't be used for byte-compiling) the package manager fails to create a package.
I've only come up with one possible sollution to this. Which is, push the byte-compiling of the code into a post-install script. This way the byte-compiling can be done on the target machine. But maybe there is a better sollution? It is not allowed to have diff between the debian and the emdebian packaging files.
Best regards,
Marc