Re: dpkg-checkbuilddeps to generate a frontend friendly package list

[Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org>]

Hi,

sorry to not have responded earlier.

On Fri, 04 Dec 2009, George Danchev wrote:
> 1) Would you accept patches like that, based on AptPkg, i.e. is it too 
> intrusive for you? I can see your reasons if you prefer to avoid the extra 
> dependency on libapt-pkg-perl.

AptPkg is really a no-go for me.

I don't see why it's so important to verify that we have one available
version to satisfy the build-dependency if we're going to fail anyway.

There are definitely some improvements to do in dpkg-checkbuilddeps
though. Producing that "frontend-frienly" list is certainly
useful as is introducing a new option to have a machine readable output:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=214566

I'm certainly interested in patches for those issues. Please work on
the master branch, there have been some recent changes due to the API
cleanup.

Also please use the various existing modules when possible (for example
Dpkg::Version for version comparison).

> 3) Rewrite that with calls to `apt-cache policy' (to get available package 
> versions) and `dpkg --compare-versions' (for version comparisons), which is 
> not a sign of great engineering ;-)

Hell no.

> 4) Leave that to the Almighty sbuild tool?

That's the current situation, no?

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog