Proposal, a Build-Depends-Optional field

[Gianfranco Costamagna <costamagnagianfranco@yahoo.it>]

Hi Debian Developers!

I don't know how much is feasible and useful the field.

Problem: I have a package that might depend on a libfoo-dev
library.

"might" because it tries to detect it at configure time,
and if the libfoo is found some features are enabled, otherwise
the features are disabled.

Since the libfoo isn't build on every architecture, I would like to
have some field in my control file, like
"try to install it, if not found just discard it", instead of keeping
track of every architecture built or not at each upload and enable when
a new architecture is successfully built.

I know this might introduce some problems (binNMU?, ABI/API incompatibilities?)

is something similar already implemented?

thanks,

Gianfranco