Build-deps on buggy packages.
Moi!
I've come across this situation several times now, and I'd like hear
what's general opinion. Consider the following:
I maintain package foo which build-depends on package bar. It builds fine on
several archs. One day, someone files me a serious bug because foo refuses to
auto-build. It turns out my package is fine, but the failure is caused by a
screw-up in the current bar-package. I file a bug on bar, which gets fixed
in the next version.
But what about package foo? Should I re-upload with
Build-Depends: bar (>= fixed-version), being nice to porters/auto-builders
at the cost of people who might try to build my package from source on,
say, a woody system with an earlier (and perfectly working) version of
bar? In other words, should I use versions in Build-Depends to reflect
source-level or packaging-level dependencies? While the former seems to
be more appealing at first sight, how do I tell folks "but don't build
against version x.y.z of bar because it's known to be buggy, and don't
bother filing my bugs about it"?
Opinions?
Regards,
Daniel.
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