Bug#374029: Fixing inconsisten and unusefull Build-Depends/Conflicts definition

[Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net>]

Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
> On the other hand the savings can be huge. Think about how many
> packages install latex and fonts and generate the documentation
> needlessly during build. Installing and purging latex as well as all
> the initex runs and font generation takes up a awfull lot of time

I think most packages build their documentation or other 
architecture-independent parts as part of a general make/make install 
process, so it's not possible to create useful separate build-arch and 
build-indep targets.

Looking at the archive right now, there are only 129 source packages (in 
testing) that are not Architecture: all and declare Build-Depends-Indep 
(and quite a few of those are obviously wrong).  So it seems to be a 
limited problem.  However, if your concern is mostly to reduce 
installation time of documentation tools, then the current 
Build-Depends/Build-Depends-Indep setup seems to work quite well.  I 
don't see where Build-Depends-Arch would fit in there.