Re: Test suites after build and Build-Depends.

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> writes:

> Well, according to the Policy sections 5.2 and 4.10, it (should ? must?)
> work.

Policy 5.2:

    These fields are used by dpkg-gencontrol to generate control files for
    binary packages (see below), by dpkg-genchanges to generate the
    .changes file to accompany the upload, and by dpkg-source when it
    creates the .dsc source control file as part of a source archive. Many
    fields are permitted to span multiple lines in debian/control but not
    in any other control file. These tools are responsible for removing
    the line breaks from such fields when using fields from debian/control
    to generate other control files.

    The fields here may contain variable references - their values will be
    substituted by dpkg-gencontrol, dpkg-genchanges or dpkg-source when
    they generate output control files. See Variable substitutions:
    debian/substvars, Section 4.10 for details.

What this is saying is that substvars will be expanded by those three
programs when generating the *.dsc, the *.changes, and the binary control
files.  However, while build dependency information is copied into the
*.dsc file, my understanding is that it's not read from that file for
package builds.  Build dependency information is read directly from
debian/control and hence cannot get the benefit of any pre-processing of
debian/control.  See dpkg-source(1) under the description of the -c
option.

> In reality, it is an endangered mechanism, as it was deprecated in
> January 2008.

I'm not sure what you're referring to here.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>