Bug#1052460: tech-ctte: In re ticket 1051368: including Selenium Manager in python3-selenium package

[Christoph Berg <myon@debian.org>]

Re: Helmut Grohne
> > As I noted in ticket 1051368, building Selenium Manager so that it can
> > be included in the package is straightforward. In particular, it
> > requires just four steps:
> > 
> > 1. Download the Selenium source code from GitHub or somewhere else it
> >    is published
> > 
> > 2. Download a bazel binary from
> >    https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazelisk/releases and make it
> >    executable in your search path
> 
> This second step seems incompatible with established Debian processes
> such as DFSG item 2.
> 
> > 3. Unpack the Selenium source code
> > 
> > 4. Run "bazel build //rust:selenium-manager" in the top directory of
> >    the Selenium source code

To emphasize this part a bit more: the "straightforward" solution has
to be entirely self-contained within Debian.

That means all the bazelisk source code, all its Go dependencies, all
its build system tools need to be present as Debian packages,
including the source code and dependencies of these tools, and so on.
If you try to do that with a new software ecosystem, this is an
enormous task. (Parts of Bazel are packaged, but from what I've heard,
even keeping that up to date is a difficult task.)

And of course all the rust dependencies of selenium-manager must be
packaged as well - no downloads at build time permitted.

Christoph