Re: Versioned dependencies on dh-octave + Rules-Requires-Root

[Rafael Laboissière <rafael@debian.org>]

* Sébastien Villemot <sebastien@debian.org> [2025-08-17 10:20]:

> I’ve noticed that most of our packages both depend on dh-octave and dh- 
> sequence-octave (with a version constraint for the former).
>
> When the version constraint on dh-octave corresponds to an old version 
> (i.e. is satisfied in stable, or even in oldstable), then the whole 
> build dependency on dh-octave is unnecessary and can be dropped. I’ve 
> done that in octave-io and everything seems to work correctly.

I added this versioned build-dependency in version 2.6.4-2 of the 
package. This is the relevant part in d/changelog:

  * No need for cleaning *-tst files
    + d/clean: Drop line with src/*.cc-tst
    + d/control: Build-depend on dh-octave >= 1.2.2. In this version
      dh_octave_clean removes the src/*-tst files.

> Also note that the dh_octave_make script systematically adds such a 
> versioned build dependency, which looks superfluous to me.
>
> So is there any other reason to keep those build-dependencies on dh- 
> octave, that I may be missing?

I think that it is just to ensure that newly created packages depend on 
the version of dh-octave that contains the dh_octave-make script that 
generated the package. This may be superfluous in some cases, indeed. Do 
you see it as a nuisance?

> By the way, I’ve also started to remove “Rules-Requires-Root: no” in my 
> latest uploads, since that value is now the default (since dpkg-dev 
> 1.22.13).

Thanks for that. I am preparing a mass change to remove 
“Rules-Requires-Root: no”. I will also adjust dh_octave_make so that it 
no longer adds this field.

Best,

Rafael