Requesting advice on build dependencies

[Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org>]

  Hi,

  One of my packages (heroes) builds a version linked against GGI and
a version linked against SDL.  In the past, I built both packages (heroes-ggi
and heroes-sdl) unconditionally.  However, a bugreport (#68669) pointed out to
me that some platforms (I think it was m68k at the time) lack one or the other
of these libraries.  To fix the problem, I altered the build process to test
for the availablility of the -dev packages and only build against the library
that was installed.  When I did this, I also altered the build dependency
so that only one of {SDL, GGI} was required to be installed.

  Now, I notice that heroes is not getting into testing.  In fact, it has
never made it into testing.  The update_excuses log mutters something about
arm being out of date, but only recently did I realize what's going on: because
the build-dependency is specified as an "OR", arm quite logically concludes
that either library is fine, and proceeds to only install SDL.  But since
the GGI version was built on arm in the past, this leaves an obsolete GGI
build hanging around.

  Now, as I see it, I have several options here:

  (a) Build-Depend unconditionally on both ggi and sdl, but add architecture
  tags specifying which archs the dependency applies to.  This is ugly, since
  I have to constantly keep track of which architectures ggi and sdl are
  working on this week.

  (b) Build-Depend only on SDL, and drop GGI support (or make it an option
  for manual builds)  This means discarding all the work I put into making
  the SDL and GGI builds play nicely together, but such is life.

  (c) ...do something else?

  I'd like to keep the ability to install both versions if possible, but
I definitely do NOT want to do (a), and the GGI version isn't that critical.
(note: this is also a good time to scream bloody murder if you want me to
keep the GGI compile :-) )

  Any suggestions about what I can fill in c's blank with?

   Thanks,
  Daniel

-- 
/-------------------- Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> -------------------\
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