ITP: build-essential

[Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho <gaia@iki.fi>]

As previously discussed on -policy, I am announcing my intent to create
a new metapackage called `build-essential'.  Its primary function is
to serve as the informal list of build-essential package referred to by
the forthcoming policy edition.  It fulfills this mission in two ways:

 * It will Depend: on all non-essential packages which are build-essential
 * It will install a file /usr/share/doc/build-essential/list, which
   contains the informational list of build-essential packages.

Publishing this list as a metapackage gives us several advantages:
  * it suffices to install this package to get an environment required
    for building Debian packages 
    + consequently, to build a given package A, you just need to install
      this package and the packages A lists as its build-time
      dependencies.
    + consequently, all implementations of the build-time dependency
      spec will automatically use the same list of build-essential
      packages
  * To report an error in this list, just "reportbug build-essential".
  * Since this is an ordinary package, it takes nothing special
    to maintain two different versions of it, one for stable and one
    for unstable (and occasionally yet another for frozen).

Why not call this task-build-essential, as I originally proposed?
Because this is not a task package and should not presented for
installation at system install time with the other metapackages.

-- 
%%% Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho % gaia@iki.fi % http://www.iki.fi/gaia/ %%%

                                  ""
                             (John Cage)