On Mon, Jun 09, 2003 at 10:59:18AM +0100, Julian Gilbey wrote: > > It can be worthwhile to state explicitly what happen for source > > arch:all packages in the policy. > > He's right. Lots of Arch: all packages (correctly) use > Build-Depends-Indep and not Build-Depends at all. With this change to > policy, almost all of them will immediately cease being policy > compliant. (Most have debhelper as a dependency in the clean target.) > So what should this policy be? I understand the desire not to require > Build-Depends-Indep to clean, but this isn't quite the way to do it > properly. > > Any ideas? It's important to note the context here, I'd say. The reason for the build-depends vs build-depends-indep split is so that autobuilders don't waste too much time (un)installing stuff they won't need in the end, it's not for statistical reasons or anything like that. One could put everything in Build-Depends, and still be policy compliant. If this detail (which it really is) is important, that should be taken care of, too. For the time being, it is IMHO better we just make sure that automated builds don't fail because it's policy compliant to do something which happens not to be implemented that way. I most certainly agree that it's possible to specify more detailed build-depends, which would make sure the package builds in all possible and impossible situation we could think of, but that's not why Debian needs build-time dependencies. We need it to make sure our users can build packages (which they usually will do by doing something like 'apt-get -b source foo', which builds all packages, not just the binary-indep ones) and for our autobuilders to function correctly (for which this amendment will make sure everything works; I've seen people using build-depends-indep on packages with both binary-arch and binary-indep targets, where the clean target needed one of the build-dependencies). Policy currently explicitely says that people doing builds of only the architecture-independent packages are assumed to know what they're doing. -- Wouter Verhelst Debian GNU/Linux -- http://www.debian.org Nederlandstalige Linux-documentatie -- http://nl.linux.org "An expert can usually spot the difference between a fake charge and a full one, but there are plenty of dead experts." -- National Geographic Channel, in a documentary about large African beasts.
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