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Is debhelper build-essential?



The stats:

  8,920  source packages in Debian unstable main.
  8,254  declare a build-dependency on debhelper

  = 92% of packages build-depend on debhelper.

Is that sufficient to declare it build-essential?


The downside:

  Package: debhelper
  Depends: perl (>= 5.6.0-16), coreutils | fileutils (>= 4.0-2.1),
	   file (>= 3.23-1), dpkg-dev (>= 1.7.0), html2text,
	   debconf-utils (>= 1.1.1), binutils, po-debconf

However:

  perl provides perl5 which is a dependency of dpkg-dev, which is
    build-essential

  coreutils/fileutils is already Essential
  
  dpkg-dev (albeit an earlier versioned dependency) is already
    build-essential

  binutils is a dependency of gcc-3.3, which is build-essential

This means:

  debhelper would be build-essential

  by dependency; file, html2text, debconf-utils & po-debconf would also
    become build-essential

  and their dependencies (etc.)


It can be argued that these are already effectively build-essential due
to the high number of packages build-depending on them anyway.

What say you?

Scott
-- 
Have you ever, ever felt like this?
Had strange things happen?  Are you going round the twist?

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