Re: noob needs a little help making a package.

[Florent Rougon <f.rougon@free.fr>]

Justin Pryzby <justinpryzby@users.sourceforge.net> wrote:

> You list the build-dependencies as best you know them, and then build
> in pbuilder.  If it does not build, then you look at the last line,
> and figure out what it needs that it didn't have, and add the
> appropriate thing.  If it does build, then you remove the build-deps
> one by one to make sure that each one is, in fact, necessary.

Well, in general, the goal is not to find a minimal set of
build-dependencies that allows building, but to find /the/ minimal set
of build-dependencies that allows building the package /in the desired
configuation/.

I mean, suppose a package can optionally use, e.g., FreeType, and
detects the library with its configure script (which is run at build
time). If you remove libfreetype6-dev (or whatever you are
build-depending on when you want to link your program to FreeType), the
package *will* build successfully. But it will not have FreeType
support.

So, in general, you should only keep the build-dependencies that:
  - are not build-essential (nor essential, since this implies
    build-essential);
  - are necessary to build the package in the configuration you think
    is best for Our Users (often, this means linking to every library
    that the package can make use of, and is in Debian---except maybe
    for very experimental stuff).

[ I suppose this is what Justin meant, but I am not sure it was obvious
  to the OP. ]

-- 
Florent