Bug#218893: Autodetecting existence of build-arch target

[Wouter Verhelst <wouter@grep.be>]

On Wed, May 05, 2004 at 05:34:10PM +0200, Bill Allombert wrote:
> But in practice this is not true:
> Only packages that currently FTBFS would work unmodified. All others
> will need to be modified to resplit Build-Depends-Indep from
> Build-Depends before build-arch to be really useful.

How's that? Build-Depends is *not* the opposite of Build-Depends-Indep;
put otherwise, there is no such thing as "Build-Depends-Arch";
Build-Depends could hypothetically be renamed to "Build-Depends-Common"
and stay semantically the same thing.

[...]
> 2) buildd need to know whether it should install Build-Depends-Indep.

Not true. Buildd does not install build-depends-indep, and should not
ever; any proposal that would require in buildd to install
build-depends-indep is broken by design.

Indeed, the very reason for build-depends-indep to exist is for buildd
to /avoid/ installing unnecessary build-dependencies, to not waste time
installing stuff which isn't needed anyway.

[...]

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