Bug#759186: debian-policy: please consider adding "nodoc" as a possible value for DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS to policy

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Johannes Schauer wrote:

> please consider adding "nodoc" as a possible DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS value to
> § 4.9.1 [1].
[...]
> When bootstrapping, a common approach is to do a build without documentation to
> be able to drop the build dependencies on documentation building tools. This is
> why the build profile name "nodoc" exists which, if enabled, allows
> builds without documentation [3].

Could we just point people to the build profile and encourage using
that instead of DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS for nodoc builds?

>                                   It would make sense to allow this
> value in DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS as well as the build profile "nocheck" was
> also borrowed from DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS.

For comparison, I don't understand why "nocheck" would be a build
profile.  It doesn't change the produced binary packages, so build
profiles don't seem like a good fit at first glance.

Is the problem that 'nocheck' changes the build-time dependencies?

Is it possible for a package to specify pre-upload checks that should
run on autobuilders using autopkgtest, which would avoid having to
have an DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS based ifdef for that?

Curious,
Jonathan