Bug#1027832: debian-policy: Please clarify that priority required packages are not automatically build essential
El 4/1/23 a las 17:16, Russ Allbery escribió:
But if you are building new Debian packages,
by definition you are not in a tiny minimal system case. build-essential
is already somewhat arbitrary and chosen for convenience (most packages do
not require a C++ compiler). Why not expand build-essential to what we're
largely doing in practice to fix the consistency problem (which is a real
issue) but not add work tweaking build dependencies for a bunch of
packages?
A minimal build essential set provides and generates useful information that
a build essential set which is not so minimal does not provide.
For example, some packages have unit tests which depend on the information
stored on tzdata. In some cases, changes in tzdata causes those unit tests
to fail.
The tzdata package is updated often in stable. If we were to know in advance
what packages could break, we could look at the packages which build-depend on it,
either directly or indirectly.
If we don't have such information, we can't even try to do that.
So, a minimal build essential set has the same benefits as a minimal essential set,
namely, that we know a lot better which are the real build-dependencies or the
real dependencies, as they are not hidden.
Thanks.
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