Re: draft ballot: please rule on how to implement debian/rules build-arch

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Russ Allbery writes ("Re: draft ballot: please rule on how to implement debian/rules build-arch"):
> Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> writes:
> > BTW, another option for the long-term solution which we haven't really
> > addressed head-on is that dpkg-buildpackage could detect whether both
> > arch-indep and arch-dep packages are present in debian/control, and use
> > build-arch *only* when both are present.
> 
> I think this sounds like an excellent idea.

This would be a nice way out.  Do we know what proportion of packages
would fail if we did this ?

Another possibility, inspired by some bootstrapping machinery Wookey
told me about, would be this:
   DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=build-arch-only debian/rules build
Either as a transitional arrangement, or permanently.  I mention it
here because it seems like a plausible idea and we should consider
whether we like it.

Personally I really dislike all the make-based heuristic autodetection
and will vote any of those below FD (although I expect to be
outvoted).

Maybe we're going to end up with "break n% of the archive" as the
least-hated answer...

Ian.