On 20040125T112907-0800, Shaun Jackman wrote: > When packaging a new package, what's a methodical way to find *all* > its Build-Depends packages? What I do is I get familiar with the package. I read upstream notes about required packages, I read through the configure.in or configure.ac, if any, checking for which libraries and programs are being looked for, I read Makefiles, I look at each source file, searching for #includes or imports that do not belong to the standard packages and so on. And yes, I look at shlibdeps output :) IMHO the "building in a chroot" method suggested by others is not a substitute for this. For one thing, a missing build-time dependency may cause the configuration script to disable a feature instead of aborting the build. Also, if building in a chroot is the only method used, important information required to make a good Build-Depends line is missing: you should list packages *you* need, not what your other build-time depends need, and there is no information helping in choosing an appropriate versioned build-depends, which is a policy requirement (one that is often hard to follow even with my method but nearly impossible without it). I generally don't build in a chroot, and I rarely get Build-Depends-related FTBFS bugs; and those that I do get frequently are of the kind that I would not have caught if I had built in a chroot. However, building in a chroot never hurts, if you have a setup that makes it easy. -- Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho, Debian developer http://kaijanaho.info/antti-juhani/blog/en/debian
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