Re: Fwd: Build-Depends-Indep dependencies

[Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>]

Ansgar Burchardt <ansgar@43-1.org> writes:

> anatoly techtonik <techtonik@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Can anybody point me to the part of the policy where Build-Depends and
>> Build-Depends-Indep differences are explained?
>
> They differ in when they must be satisfied (that is for running which
> target in debian/rules).  See Section 7.7 [1].
>
> Regards,
> Ansgar
>
> [1] <http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html#s-sourcebinarydeps>

And policy is wrong. Or at least nobody and nothing follows policy in
this. The reason for that is that build-arch and build-indep are
optional and dpkg-buildpackage must always calls the build target to
build. This has been a problem for a long time but there seems to be too
much resistance against just fixing it.


So actual practice is this:

Build-Depends must list everything needed to build the arch dependend
packages of a source. Anything that is needed on the buildd. Anything
needed to run "dpkg-buildpackage -B". This includes calling the "build"
target and contrary to policy Build-Depends-Indep will not be installed
when this is called.

Build-Depends-Indep must list everything that is needed to build the
arch indep packages of a source that isn't already in Build-Depends.

Other than that usage may varry a bit. Some people list packages in
Build-Depends and Build-Depends-Indep. Some people just list everything
in Build-Depends.

MfG
        Goswin