Re: Use of the Build-Conflicts field

[Ansgar <ansgar@debian.org>]

Sean Whitton writes:
> Use of the Build-Conflicts field is currently mostly optional, but Ian
> Jackson and I have been working on text for Debian Policy that would
> require its use in certain cases.  See #824495 for the discussion.
>
> There are two cases which we think that everyone would agree that there
> is a bug, but we are not sure that the bug would be considered to be RC.
> We are posting to -devel to see if, in fact, we do have a consensus that
> these bugs would be RC, or not.
>
> (1) a package FTBFSs when: another package that is part of a "reasonable
>     standard development workstation install" is present, but the first
>     package does not declare a Build-Conflicts against the second
>
> (2) a package FTBFSs when: a package that is NOT part of a "reasonable
>     standard development workstation install" is present, but the first
>     package does not declare a Build-Conflicts against the second
>
> Is (1) an RC-severity bug in the package that FTBFSs?  Is (2)?

How many packages would be affected by (1) or (2)?

I think both are less problematic than the case where the maintainer
uploaded a package which has different features than a rebuild on a
buildd.　That would result in a rebuild (NMUs, next regular upload by
someone else or a changed build environment, binNMUs) to change the
features available to users.  Something we really don't want; note that
this could also happen in security or stable updates.

(Having Build-Conflicts for the additional features case is probably not
implementable with reasonable effort given how autotools and others
enable automatic feature-detection by default which isn't really what
one wants...)

Failing to build in non-standard environments is in contrast a fairly
friendly failure mode.  So it should not be a serious bug (whether RC or
not is something for the release team).

> For the purposes of this e-mail, let's assume that we have a good grasp
> on what a "reasonable standard development workstation install" means.

I doubt we have, but let's ignore that.

Ansgar