Re: serious bugs because of missing build depends

[Julian Gilbey <J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk>]

On Sun, Feb 25, 2001 at 11:32:24AM +0000, Jules Bean wrote:
> > However, until it becomes a MUST, we should certainly not submit mass
> > bug reports.  In the meantime, perhaps lintian should warn if there is
> > no Build-Depends(-Indep) line, seeing that most packages will need one
> > (for debhelper, if nothing else).
> 
> Hmm.  I feel I've missed something here.  How does debhelper need/use
> them?

debhelper is not in build-essential list, so if a package uses it, it
must specify:

Build-Depends(-Indep): debhelper [version-spec]

> I feel this is a problem with debian; getting all the information the
> developers need to know to the developers.  Maybe there should be a
> developer's news a bit like DWN which summarises significant policy
> changes but also things like new tools (new version of apt/debhelper,
> and how they will make life better).

I'll post an announcement to -devel-announce when the rewritten policy
is ready.  Significant things should probably go into DWN.

> While I'm on the subject:  I don't really want to track sid, since it
> is a little too dangerous.  I could track sid in a chroot, but my
> preferred solution is to track sid only for the depends and
> build-depends of the packages I maintain (since it's important they
> are built against the latest libraries etc.). It would be nice to have 
> apt-get install deps-and-build-deps-of-<foo> to get the sid versions - 
> is there a tool for this?

I believe apt 0.4.0 can do this.

   Julian

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         Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, Queen Mary, Univ. of London
       Debian GNU/Linux Developer,  see http://people.debian.org/~jdg
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