Re: Use of the Build-Conflicts field
On Sat, Feb 16, 2019 at 12:00 PM Sean Whitton wrote:
> 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.
Personally, the main RC use-case I can think of for such a field is
where the recursive chain of Build-Depends reaches at some point a set
of alternative dependencies and one of them causes an FTBFS or other
breakage in the package and so you want to make apt choose the other
alternative.
Any other use-cases imply a non-minimal chroot, which isn't our
standard build environment so I don't think they should be RC.
Other folks have already mentioned the use-case of avoiding optional
dependencies being installed affecting the reproducibility of the
build artefacts.
Obviously it is a good idea to declare all of the conflicts (optional
deps, FTBFS) to avoid frustration during development though.
I think QA efforts like the buildd-from-hell idea could help
automatically find such issues, if that ever happens.
--
bye,
pabs
https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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