Simon McVittie:
On Thu, 22 Feb 2024 at 20:43:21 +0100, Niels Thykier wrote:Simon McVittie:On Thu, 22 Feb 2024 at 19:32:21 +0100, Niels Thykier wrote:We could also make unused substvars a hard failure (FTBFS).I'd prefer not thisReminder: My proposal only covers ${foo:Depends} and similar substvars. The first example you present uses substvars that do not match that pattern.Sorry, did you mean that your alternate proposal is: we could make unused substvars **that match *:Depends** (and the other related patterns) a hard failure, without affecting substvars not matching that pattern? If so, that wasn't obvious to me!
Indeed, that is what I meant. I see that others had the same confusion, which could probably avoided if I had said "relationship substvars" instead. Sorry for the confusion.
If the scope of "unused substvars => hard failure" is limited to foo:Depends and so on, then yes, I agree that the concern I described doesn't apply.
Thanks for confirming.
Another reason to be cautious about making missing foo:Depends a hard
failure is that it would mean tools usually can't add new :Depends without
either gating it behind a debhelper compat level bump (or equivalent),
or making potentially large numbers of dependent packages regress
(usually discouraged). So I still prefer your initial proposal.
smcv
Thank you. I agree with this counter argument. That seems like a very annoying problem to deal with that will likely cause a lot of extra "infrastructure" that I think nobody wants.
Thanks for the feedback. It was very useful :) Best regards, Niels