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

[Dmitrijs Ledkovs <xnox@debian.org>]

On 10 September 2012 13:46, Jon Dowland <jmtd@debian.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 08, 2012 at 10:01:17PM +1000, Dmitry Smirnov wrote:
>> When building for as many architectures as we have, situation when some
>> dependencies are missing (or can't exist) on some architectures is not rare.
>>
>> However we still want to build our packages with all features possible.
>
> You should have two (or more) binary targets, each of which excludes the
> architecture(s) that do not support the particular feature. E.g. if baz is
> not available on hurd:
>
>         Package: foo
>         Architecture: any !hurd
>         Build-Depends: bar libbaz-dev
>
> (I forget the precise syntax for excluding an arch here)
> and
>
>         Package: foo-hurd
>         Build-Depends: bar
>         Architecture: hurd
>
> Or possibly in some circumstances
>
>         Package: foo-minimal
>         Build-Depends: bar
>         Architecture: any
>
> …where foo without baz might be useful for someone on any architecture.
>

Sure, but is that allowed? Specifying Build-Depends in the Package stanzas?

My understanding was that Build-Depends are specified in the Source:
paragraph. The "-full / -minimal" binary package split, gets rid of
the optional run time depends, but this does not remove the build-time
dependency.

Regards,

Dmitrijs.