On Mon, 12 Nov 2007, Jon Buller wrote:
>> [ada] [gcc]
>
> I don't think we want some almost infinitely long chain of
> dependencies here.  All you need is the last version to compile the
> next.  So if you keep a copy of the last binary in a package, you
> are all set, provided the make install step doesn't gripe about the
> package being already installed, or takes some action to work around
> it.

You might not want a long chain of dependencies, but I do, because I
might not have a trusted executable installation of the previous version
of the compiler, and I prefer compiling it myself to downloading an
executable from somebody else.

> So my question is: Is this just a simple matter of adding a
> pre-install target that deletes the previous package version (used to
> build the current one), or is something more subtle required?

For what you want, yes, I suspect that that would be good enough.

--apb (Alan Barrett)