Re: How often is any package tested for FTBS on main arch ?
Neil Williams <codehelp@debian.org> writes:
> Dominique Dumont <dod@debian.org> wrote:
>> We, sdl maintainers, made a recent change in our package by removing
>> unnecessary build depends on -dev packages [1].
> ... at which point you should have looked at the list of reverse
> dependencies and done some tests yourselves before uploading ...
While this would be nice if Dominique had the time, I disagree with the
"should" part of this sentence. Working around bugs in other people's
packages shouldn't be a requirement. It's certainly *appreciated* if one
wants to go to the work of finding and reporting those bugs, but to me
that's a general Debian bug fixing task, not something for which the -dev
package maintainer has any special responsibility.
> ... which could, arguably, be jointly your fault as this could have been
> handled cleanly if done so in advance. Yes, the maintainer of the other
> packages made a mistake by relying on indirect dependencies (it's
> usually best to build-depend on everything you check for in your
> configure stage) but that bug was revealed by your change, so it would
> have been helpful to raise this as a problem in advance.
For "usually best" please replace "mandatory and required by Policy"
except for some cases where packages are *defined* as providing the
necessary interfaces as part of their purpose. (dh-autoreconf, for
example.) The packages that don't have accurate build dependencies are
the ones at "fault" here.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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