On 02/22/2011 06:08 PM, Roger Leigh wrote:
I agree that the documentation is sorely lacking in this regard. It is, however, an unofficial and unwritten policy. The need for this is fairly self-explanatory: we don't want builds to vary. Taking one of php5's dependencies as an example: libdb-dev (>= 4.7) | libdb4.8-dev | libdb4.6-dev This dependency permits building against no less than *three* different Berkeley DB versions.
Which is fine as the package build properly against all of them. If you want to limit the usage to one of the mentioned packages, this should be done in the buildd or even earlier. Requiring to change the build-dependency line will make backporting such packages a real pain in the ass, same for keeping Build-Depens in a working shape for Debian, Ubuntu and other distributions. So instead of requiring people to remove those alternatives from build-dependencies, the issue should be fixed in the buildd software - it should know which libraries are available on all architectures and build against them, or maybe stick to the first available package in the list.
-- Bernd Zeimetz Debian GNU/Linux Developer http://bzed.de http://www.debian.org GPG Fingerprints: ECA1 E3F2 8E11 2432 D485 DD95 EB36 171A 6FF9 435F