Bug#629385: Request for TC to rule on a course of action for supporting build-arch

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

I believe that the discussion of this has reached a conclusion and the
dpkg maintainers are moving forward with an implementation.  At this
point, it seems like the right thing for the Technical Committee to do is
to affirm that we agree with the approach arrived at.

I propose the following ballot:

A. dpkg-buildpackage, when doing a binary-only build (-B), should probe
   the package with "make -qn" to see if the build-arch target appears to
   be implemented.  If so, it should use "debian/rules build-arch" to
   build the package instead of "debian/rules build".  If it detects via
   "make -qn" that the target is missing, it should output a warning
   asking the packager to implement the required targets, and then fall
   back to using "debian/rules build".

   The fallback to "debian/rules build" and the "make -qn" auto-detection
   are temporary to ease the transition but should be dropped at some
   point (wheezy+1, or wheezy+2).

   Debian Policy should be updated to make build-arch and build-indep
   mandatory targets.

B. Further discussion

Please send any wording changes to the above, or any other options that
you believe should be on the ballot.  If there are no objections, I plan
to call for a vote in a few days.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>