Re: NMU and ./configure

[cjw44@flatline.org.uk (Colin Watson)]

Itai Zukerman <zukerman@math-hat.com> wrote:
>A few days ago I had to rebuild gimp1.1 from source to fix a little
>bug that was stalling my work.  I noticed that since I have LPRng
>installed on my system, ./configure came up with different settings
>than the gimp binary in the archive was compiled with (specifically,
>lpstat support was enabled in the print plugin).
>
>Now it occurs to me that if I were to NMU this package (which I have
>no intention of doing!), I will be uploading a binary package
>significantly different from the one in the archive.  I imagine this
>is the case for a great many packages that rely on ./configure and
>having certain software installed (I don't expect gimp to build-depend
>on lpr!).  Is there a solution to this problem?

It should be possible to force the configure script never to enable the
feature in question: --disable-lpstat or whatever. If not, the
configuration system should probably be patched so that you can. Anybody
should be able to install all the build-dependencies, build the package,
and get the same result as before (assuming they have the same version
of all the build-dependencies as the maintainer). If they can't do this
with a particular package installed, I'd say that e.g. gimp would have
to declare a Build-Conflicts: against lprng; we don't want alternate
versions of gimp depending on lprng as maintainer and non-maintainer
uploads are made. This is pretty undesirable, though.

Build-time relationships can be surprising. I recently rebuilt my (as
yet unofficial) trn4 package, having recently installed heimdal-lib to
satisfy some dependencies, and found that the baroque upstream Configure
script looked for a libhdb, presumably to support some other Unix
system; unfortunately, libhdb is part of heimdal-lib on Debian, and
since I didn't have the relevant development packages installed the
build then failed. As a workaround, I added a line to debian/Policy.sh
to specify exactly which optional libraries I wanted to be used.

-- 
Colin Watson                                     [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]