Bug#766678: False positive for missing-build-dependency cdbs
Joachim Breitner <nomeata@debian.org> writes:
> Am Sonntag, den 26.10.2014, 12:29 +0100 schrieb Jakub Wilk:
>> * Joachim Breitner <nomeata@debian.org>, 2014-10-24, 22:35:
>>> I get
>>> E: helium source: missing-build-dependency cdbs
>>> on a package that build-depends on haskell-devscripts. It is a false
>>> positive, because haskell-devscripts depends on cdbs.
>>> It seems that either this fact (haskell-devscripts depending on cdbs)
>>> needs to be known to lintian,
>> I think we should rather teach Lintian than
>> /usr/share/cdbs/1/class/hlibrary.mk is provided by haskell-devscripts,
>> rather than by cdbs itself. Or is your package including any other
>> makefiles from /usr/share/cdbs/ ? (The package doesn't seem to be in
>> the archive, so I can't check myself.)
> they all have these two lines
> include /usr/share/cdbs/1/rules/debhelper.mk
> include /usr/share/cdbs/1/class/hlibrary.mk
In this case, Lintian believes you should also declare an explicit
dependency on CDBS, since providing the first of those two files is not
really part of the interface contract for haskell-devscripts. It's
provided by CDBS itself.
In general, Lintian takes the philosophy that relying on transitive
dependencies (such as assuming haskell-devscripts will always pull in
cdbs) is often a source of surprise bugs years later, and adding the
explicit dependencies for every package used directly during the build is
better. That way, you don't get suddenly surprised if haskell-devscripts
downgrades cdbs to a Recommends because it's now also providing a dh
plugin (to make up a hypothetical possibility). It also has some minor
documentation benefits to make those dependencies explicit.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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