Re: Source-Depends implementation

[Dale Scheetz <dwarf@polaris.net>]

First of all I want to congratulate the participants in this discussion.
It is beginning to look like we may come to closure on the issue of source
depends, and that is a very good thing!

I had one "real" point I wanted to make here:

There are many packages that can equally well be built with terminfo,
ncurses, or slang. This doesn't necessarily mean that we must provide the
variability withing the depends field, but there are possible
ramifications for buiding alternatives that should be looked at closely to
see if there is a gotcha.

Since I can always install a source package by simply copying it from an
ftp site (something that I can do with a .deb as well) and I can unpack it
with tools other than dpkg-source. It should be possible, as it is in
dpkg, to force dpkg-source to install when dependencies are not met.
(dpkg-source may not even need to know about these depends if apt and
friends test them before calling dpkg-source)

The other side of this is that, once installed (without a dependent
package) I should be able to modify the rules file and build with an
alternate library, without having dpkg-buildpackage impacted by the
depends field in the existing .dsc file.

Do either dpkg-source or dpkg-buildpackage have some compelling need to be
driven by these dependencies?

Luck,

On Tue, 12 Jan 1999, Lars Wirzenius wrote:

> [ Please don't Cc: public replies to me. ]
> 
> Ben Collins:
> > Where ever it's put, it still needs to be used by something in order to
> > help automate some things like apt-get for sources, dbuild, as well as
> > some other things.
> 
> Indeed. And it is more efficient for the automation to check things from
> a .dsc than from inside a unpacked source package. (The build.req file
> *might* be part of the upstream sources, which might be big, but the
> .dsc is always small.)
> 
> 

Dwarf
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