Bug#552200: lintian: [checks/fields] build-depends-without-arch-dep pedantic when all the packages are arch-independant.
Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> writes:
> I just got an informational ’build-depends-without-arch-dep’ tag and
> wonder what the problem is.
> If a source package only builds architecture-independant packages, is
> there a use case for not wanting to install the dependancies necessary
> to build the binary packages? Said differently, are there tools that
> take a source package that only produces Arch: all packages, unpacks it,
> and only plays with the clean, build-arch and binary-arch targets of
> debian/rules? If not, the Build-Depends/Build-Depends-Indep dichotomy is
> not necessary in that case, and this tag is pedantic at best.
I've been thinking about this for a while and today I convinced myself
that you're right. I've maintained this tag in the past (it was one of
the first things I worked on in Lintian), but it's really not justified.
For packages that build only architecture-independent packages, there is
no reason to move things from Build-Depends to Build-Depends-Indep as
defined in Policy and it just creates the possibility of bugs.
I'm therefore just deleting the whole tag and the machinery that
implements it. It has been minorly useful in that it's pointed us to
additional checks Lintian can perform for missing build dependencies, but
that's not a reason to keep it.
We can always revert the commit later if some compelling reason appears to
save it, but I think the tag was misguided and, as currently implemented,
pointless.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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