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Re: How can I get the build dependencies?



> I'm looking for an easy way of getting the build dependencies of a
> package. At the moment I do look through the build log manually, and
> if I oversee something Roman Hodek sends a bug report that the m68k
> autobuilder found some missing build dependencies.

:-)

But to answer your question: No, unfortunately there is no easy and
fool-proof way for determining the correct build dependencies :-(

The correct way would be to set up a chroot environment and install
only build-essential packages (and known build dependencies) there.
Then test build and see what's missing...

I admit that this isn't very comfortable. A first hint for
dependencies can be the central source dependency list (e.g.
http://buildd.debian.org/andrea/i386/source-dependencies-unstable.gz).
But some of the -dev packages there might be unnecessary, and the src
deps have a somewhat different set of "essential" packages, so e.g.
debhelper is always missing there.

> Is there a more comfortable way to get the build dependencies of a
> package? Or how does the m68k autobuilder find them?

It does three things:

 - It builds in a chroot like above, so that commonly installed
   packages (e.g. tetex-bin, texinfo, ...) appear as missing if
   they're not in Build-Depends.

 - It compares Build-Depends with the central source deps, which shows
   things like bison, flex, debhelper, ... which are (for efficiency)
   pre-installed in the chroot even if they're not build-essential. 

 - It makes an access time check on some commonly used binaries for
   the same reasons as above.

Roman



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