Bug#807168: debian-installer-netboot-images: required resources not declared as build-dependencies (fetches via network)
On Tue, Feb 02, 2016 at 10:25:07PM +1300, Daniel Reurich wrote:
> > debian-installer-netboot-images source package is less than 6k in size.
> > Clearly the main part of the resulting binary packages come from
> > fetching resources over the network (apparently using wget).
> Correct. And there are good reason for this. One should be able to
> build the package for another release without using that release for the
> build environment. The build process requires downloading but not
> installing udebs for use in the installer, as well as debs which are
> used to provide parts like glibc, kernel etc and they are not installed
> but the required components extracted and mostly having the symbols
> stripped (to reduce the resulting binary size) and all these parts are
> assembled into the installer image.
There is no requirement to be able to build the package for another
release than the current build environment. Now, within Debian, that's
a bit more fuzzy than it should be, but the point is that you're
supposed to build a package for the current distribution of the chroot.
> Perhaps Debian Policy §4.2 should be amended to either carve out an
> exception for debian installer and similar packages or a more generic
> exception such that it only applies to the binary debs and not other
> build artifacts.
>
> Either that or Debian will have to implement a different solution for
> building the installer images. YMMV
I guess it's clear that the current state for both the netboot images
and debian-installer itself is suboptimal. But it's not unheard of that
certain packages need to ignore the rules for a while to eventually
become compliant. (Which might mean RC bug and *-ignore tags.)
Kind regards
Philipp Kern
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