Bug#218893: Autodetecting existence of build-arch target
On Wed, May 05, 2004 at 11:46:20AM +0200, Andreas Metzler wrote:
> Hello,
> I have recently asked Scott James Remnant[1] on IRC for comments on this
> problem and the proposed solution (#229357), to add Build-Options:
> build-arch' to debian/control if the package supported this target.
>
> I gathered that he was not in favour of it and prompted for alternate
> solutions he suggested
>
> make -f debian/rules -pn | grep '^binary-arch:'
I hope you meant
make -f debian/rules -pn | grep '^build-arch:'
since binary-arch is mandated by policy already.
I am not sure make -n (--dry-run) is safe though.
We could imagine make --dry-run to take an large amount of time
or actively modify the environment by use of $(shell ) construct.
Thea apparent benefit of this technique is that it will not require
packages to be modified to take advantage of it.
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.
And that will not fix buildd either: the implied assumption that
Build-Depends-Indep imply build-arch is not warranted by policy.
I would like to recall we have had a long discussion on debian-policy
about the whole issue. I proposed 4 solutions and we finally more or
less settled on the Build-Options: build-arch proposal. At least this
option was amenable to Adam Heath. Following his request I wrote a patch
to dpkg-buildpackage.
I am afraid that implementing 'make -f debian/rules -pn' instead will
lead to the same problems we tried carefully to avoid in this
discussion and will finally delay the issue even more.
1) That assume debian/rules is a Makefile and there is a long standing
flamewar on that topic. One of the dpkg maintainer disagree.
2) buildd need to know whether it should install Build-Depends-Indep.
Assuming Build-Depends-Indep split imply build-arch exist is not correct
with current policy. This mean it must know whether dpkg-buildpackage
will call build or build-arch. A control field is a clean way to do
that.
3) Build-Options scale to others feature we might want to introduce.
Cheers,
--
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>
Imagine a large red swirl here.
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