Bug#217945: dpkg-dev: should depend on build-essential

[Julian Gilbey <jdg@debian.org>]

Adam Heath wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Oct 2003, Herbert Xu wrote:
> 
> > Agreed.  However, making dpkg-checkbuilddeps do the appropriate checks
> > seems to be the logical solution.
> 
> No.  dpkg-checkbuilddeps will not enforce debian policy.  In fact, none of
> dpkg should enforce policy.
> 
> And, on that note, dpkg-dev will not build-depend on build-essential either,
> for the same reason.
> 
> We used to do this.  But Wichert convinced me it was wrong, and the change was
> backed out.

(1) You should then back out the change to the dpkg-checkbuilddeps
    manpage as well.

(2) If it is not for dpkg to enforce policy, why run
    dpkg-checkbuilddeps during dpkg-buildpackage, with an abort on
    error?

(3) A happy compromise could be for dpkg-checkbuilddeps to check for
    the presence of build-essential (or for the build-essential
    dependencies) and to warn (only) if any are not found, rather than
    to exit with an error.

    Implementing a check for the build-essential package is, as you
    know, easy; implementing a check for the build-essential
    dependencies without assuming that the package is installed would
    probably be easiest to do by dpkg build-depending on
    build-essential, then copying the dependency list into the
    dpkg-checkbuilddeps script.  And that would require dpkg-dev to
    become Architecture: any, so I don't really like this approach.

   Julian

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