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Re: Bug#687001: ITP: optional-dev -- fake (empty) dev package



On 08/09/12 08:08, Dmitry Smirnov wrote:
> Often some development libraries are not available on all architectures
> in which case maintainer should know beforehand which architectures may
> satisfy this dependency and maintain an up-to-date list of architectures
> for such packages, like in the following example:
> 
>     Build-Depends: libchamplain-gtk-0.12-dev [!m68k !sh4],
>                    libopenipmi-dev [!hurd-any !arm]
[for which a proposed replacement is]
>     Build-Depends: libchamplain-gtk-0.12-dev | optional-dev,
>                    libopenipmi-dev | optional-dev

This doesn't really give enough guarantees (even if sbuild followed
non-first branches in alternative-lists, which IIRC it doesn't). If
champlain happens to be temporarily uninstallable on (say) powerpc at
the time the empathy build happens, we don't want that to mean it
randomly loses features on powerpc, then gains those features back later.

It would perhaps make more sense if there was a way for the libchamplain
maintainer to nominate excluded architectures, so empathy could say
something like:

    Build-Depends: libchamplain-...-dev |
                   champlain-unavailable-on-this-arch

where champlain-unavailable-on-this-arch is arch:any, empty, and built
on exactly those architectures that deliberately don't build champlain.

(I don't think my example works either, again because sbuild only uses
the first alternative, but it seems closer to being right...)

    S


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