Re: Is debhelper build-essential?

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> wrote:

> Andreas Barth wrote:
>> * Hamish Moffatt (hamish@debian.org) [050114 00:45]:
>>>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.
>
[...]
> A dependency >= an old version is
> similarly redundant

That's correct from the point of view of a buildd, or of a developer
running a sid machine. But it is not correct for backporters: Imagine
that packages are added to build-essential, or versioned dependencies in
it are bumped to a higher version number. Then a package without
Build-Dependencies, or with Build-Dependencies that can be fulfilled in
stable, might still not build in a stable environment.

The solution, of course, is to first backport build-essential. For the
sake of users making their own backports, we should document this. And
we should try hard to make sure that all packages in build essential can
be backported without problems. 

I hope that debhelper won't ever need a versionened dependency on perl;
this would make life really hard for backporters, with or without being
it build-essential.

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer