Re: RFS: collectl
Tim Retout <tim@retout.co.uk> writes:
> This is correct; however, having read bug #552200, I'm not yet
> personally convinced that it deserved to be removed. If the package
> later added some arch-dependent binary packages, it would be nice to be
> consistent.
The basic problem is that while there's potentially some use to the idea
of separating out architecture-independent build requirements, Lintian
wasn't really checking that. In order to support this, you have to very
carefully structure your debian/rules so that the architecture-independent
parts aren't run by the buildds. (Which, at the moment, is actually
impossible since the buildds don't use build-arch.)
All Lintian was looking at was architecture-independent packages, which is
pointless since there's no reason to build an architecture-independent
package unless you want the architecture-independent binary packages.
Even if such a package converted to mixed architecture, chances are this
would immediately mean that everything listed in Build-Depends-Indep is
now required in Build-Depends, so the work that you did to separate them
is now wrong and has to be undone.
> (I think I could envisage an automated Perl package building tool that
> would love to be able to install automatically just the packages needed
> to run the clean rule - I shall write such a script in my copious free
> time and then complain bitterly to the lintian maintainers.)
That's a different problem than Build-Depends-Indep was intended to solve,
though.
In general, I think situations where the only target you want to run is
the clean rule are actually bugs. In particular, dpkg-source is buggy
(already reported) in that it requires that you run the clean target
before building the source package when doing anything other than an
architecture-limited build. This is wasted effort when what one is
building a source package from is an export from a VCS, such as with any
of the *-buildpackage tools, and creates an artificial requirement for
packages that have to be installed outside the build chroot just to run
the clean target to create a source package to move into the build chroot.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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