Re: Are pure virtual Depends/Recommends entries bugs?

[Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>]

Hamish Moffatt <hamish@debian.org> writes:

> Steinar mentioned problems with pure virtual build-deps. Those should
> work too. In the past bugs have been filed about those, but I think
> those are a problem because of bugs in the auto-build tools, rather than
> being an intrinsic problems with the deps.
>
>
> Hamish

Builds are suposed to be deterministic and using a pure virtual
build-deps causes a (somewhat) random package to be used on each build
attempt and _can_ result in differen packages being used on different
architecture or builds.

For e.g. a libfoo-dev package this would result in different Depends
on different archs or builds and so on. This is obviously not a good
idea so virtual build-depends have been stronlgy discouraged.

Also note that buildds will never install bar for "Build-Depends: foo
| bar" for the same reason.

MfG
        Goswin