the 'build' debian/rules target

[Colin Walters <walters@debian.org>]

Hi,

I don't quite understand the point of having the 'build' target be
mandatory.  My problem with it is precisely what policy says:

> For some packages, notably ones where the same source tree is
> compiled in different ways to produce two binary packages, the
> `build' target does not make much sense.  

It seems to me that the 'build' target is certainly useful for many
packages.  But that's not a reason to make it required.

Andrew Suffield noted on irc that 'build' was handy before we had
fakeroot, but again that's 1) addressed and 2) still not a reason to
have it be required.

The reason I bring this up is I am designing a new Debian build system,
and it's hard for me to know what to do with it exactly.
I can have users explicitly specify, but why force them to do that if
it's not useful?

So, I'd like to make a policy proposal to change build to an optional
target, much like build-arch and build-indep already are.  I know that
sbuild will need to be changed; are there any other issues?