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?
Also of interest is that some 1300 packages would no longer need to declare a Build-Depends: at all with those changes, and another 1200 wouldn't need to declare a Build-Depends-Indep:.
That's, what, a quarter of build-depends lines disappearing entirely, above and 13 of every 15 of the rest being simplified?
OTOH, it'd also mean updating build-essential every now and then to say "you can assume debhelper will support this level of features, gcc will support these features, etc...".
What say you?
Rename it to "standard-debian-build-environment". :) Cheers, aj