On Thu, Jan 13, 2005 at 04:07:29AM +0000, Scott James Remnant wrote:
> The stats:
>
> 8,920 source packages in Debian unstable main.
> 8,254 declare a build-dependency on debhelper
>
> = 92% of packages build-depend on debhelper.
>
> Is that sufficient to declare it build-essential?
>
>
> The downside:
>
> Package: debhelper
> Depends: perl (>= 5.6.0-16), coreutils | fileutils (>= 4.0-2.1),
> file (>= 3.23-1), dpkg-dev (>= 1.7.0), html2text,
> debconf-utils (>= 1.1.1), binutils, po-debconf
>
> However:
>
> perl provides perl5 which is a dependency of dpkg-dev, which is
> build-essential
>
> coreutils/fileutils is already Essential
>
> dpkg-dev (albeit an earlier versioned dependency) is already
> build-essential
>
> binutils is a dependency of gcc-3.3, which is build-essential
>
> This means:
>
> debhelper would be build-essential
>
> by dependency; file, html2text, debconf-utils & po-debconf would also
> become build-essential
>
> and their dependencies (etc.)
>
>
> It can be argued that these are already effectively build-essential due
> to the high number of packages build-depending on them anyway.
>
> What say you?
I say that 92% could well be higher than half the other stuff in
build-essential... my only question is how much this would gain us, since
so many packages have a versioned dependancy on debhelper (in fact, just
about anything that has been set up to use it in the last release or two
probably is supposed to, according to teh docs...)
Or am I being dense and missing some detail about build-essential that
would allow this issue to be overcome?
--
Joel Aelwyn <fenton@debian.org> ,''`.
: :' :
`. `'
`-
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