Re: Source build-dependencies

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

On Tue, 2013-05-14 at 08:50:39 +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 11:17 PM, Stéphane Glondu wrote:
> > Le 13/05/2013 15:51, Paul Wise a écrit :
> >> [...] as long
> >> as there is a way to build-depend on the build-dependencies for a
> >> source package, that should be fine. As a bonus we can get rid of
> >> mk-build-deps :)
> >
> > How so?
> 
> In my case, I already have metapackages for each system, so I can just
> add foo:build-deps to the Depends for those, instead of building fake
> packages with mk-build-deps.

One of the problems with mk-build-deps is that the created packages
need manual rebuilds whenever the Build-Depends change.

It's not clear to me from what has been written in this sub-thread, if
we are talking about magic srcpkg:build-deps substvars to be expanded
at build time, or if those are supposed to be valid package specifiers
that are expanded at run-time (ending up in Depends lines unexpanded,
for example), or something else.

> For the general case some apt modifications are probably needed.

For Depends, the former has the problem that it still needs manual
package rebuilds to keep track of updates. The latter that dpkg does
not have access to the available Source repository indices, to be able
to check if the dependencies are satisfiable (and such support would
be very intrusive).

For Build-Depends, the former is just not allowed in Debian as it makes
the source stanza dynamic, the latter would need changes in anything
parsing Build-Depends (dpkg-dev, sbuild, apt, etc), so just a matter
of implementing and waiting (at least) a release cycle.

Thanks,
Guillem