Bug#87159: explanation of Build-Depends et. al. is unclear
On Thu, Feb 22, 2001 at 04:44:59PM -0800, Sean 'Shaleh' Perry wrote:
> Package: debian-policy
> Version: 3.5.2.0
> Severity: normal
>
> please refer to lintian bug 86710, it asks for lintian to check the syntax of
> the Build-Depends field.
>
> Specifically, [!i386 m68k] seems like it could be valid, but seems to not be.
> The archs are also whitespace separated, some people are using commas. Perhaps
> an exmple with multiple arches would be good.
According to a careful reading of current policy, this is equivalent
to [!i386]:
If the current Debian host architecture is not in this list and
there are no exclamation marks in the list, or it is in the list
with a prepended exclamation mark, the package name and the
associated version specification are ignored completely for the
purposes of defining the relationships.
So only i386 would be ignored, and the m68k spec is irrelevant.
Nevertheless, policy should certainly discourage this confusing
syntax.
Julian
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Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, Queen Mary, Univ. of London
Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see http://people.debian.org/~jdg
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