Andreas Barth wrote:
* Hamish Moffatt (hamish@debian.org) [050114 00:45]:On Thu, Jan 13, 2005 at 02:26:52PM +0100, Steinar H. Gunderson wrote:On Thu, Jan 13, 2005 at 11:19:03PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:Also of interest is that some 1300 packages would no longer need to declare a Build-Depends: at all with those changes, and another 1200 wouldn't need to declare a Build-Depends-Indep:.Not even versioned depends?Not if build-essential included a suitable versioned depends, like debhelper (>= 4). It already does that for gcc.That would still mean a versioned dependency on build-essential.
Build dependencies on build-essential are always redundant. Build-Essential is, by definition, the set of packages you don't need to Build-Depend on. A dependency >= an old version is similarly redundant, and a dependency >= a future version is fairly useless -- it's not satisfiable after all. I guess a <= dependency might have a worthwhile meaning, though it'll certainly cause more trouble than it's worth.
Cheers, aj