On Fri, Feb 18, 2005 at 09:17:55PM +0000, Henning Makholm wrote:
> Scripsit Joel Aelwyn <fenton@debian.org>
>
> > The reason given in the origional thread was that these Depends are not
> > solely for building Debian packages (when Build-Essential is reasonable to
> > expect), but for "I need to compile $userspace package", which does *not*
> > require B-E be installed, according to current policy.
>
> But can one get a C compiler at all (at least a Debian-supplied one)
> without also pulling in an appropriate libc-dev? I would think
> that "I need to compile $userspace package" *did* require at least a
> compiler to be installed, regardless of policy.
>
> Libc6-dev does *recommend* c-compiler, but that does not help with
> "I need to compile $userspace package" if $userspace package does not
> happen to require any third-party libraries.
I guess that depends on whether one wants to rely on every package which
Provides c-compiler to also Depend on the correct libc*-dev package for
the relevant platform(s). If so, however, then it needs to become strictly
not-OK to Depend on libc*-dev unless you're doing a versioned Dependancy,
in which case you'll have to version every one of the various libc*-dev
packages correctly (since you can't rely on the Provides libc6-dev of
glibc packages to work in the presence of a versioned dependancy, and of
course the non-glibc ports don't even consider adding that header, as it
would be utterly bogus - they can't even pretend to be the same thing, only
equivalent, which is libc-dev).
Really, I think the simplest answer is a tool that detects *all* of the
relevant -dev packages, in a simple and automated fashion, for the exact
same reasons we don't expect people to try to hand-version and hand-impart
every shared library dependancy their package has, but instead provide
dpkg-shlibdeps and dh_shlibdeps.
--
Joel Aelwyn <fenton@debian.org> ,''`.
: :' :
`. `'
`-
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