Bug#727610: debian-policy: clearer discussion of why build-indep implies building the whole package

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

user debian-policy@packages.debian.org
usertags 727610 informative issue
severity 727610 wishlist
retitle 727610 debian-policy: update footnote of section 7.7 once the buildds call “binary-arch”.
thanks

Le Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 03:47:56PM +0100, Ximin Luo a écrit :
> 
> However, thinking about it a bit more, leads me to deduce that the actual
> build process is something like (B):
> 
> 1. build (-indep and -arch) on a single machine (perhaps the developer's?) 2.
> build-arch on all other machines of a different arch
> 
> The assumption then makes sense in this context, but for a person not
> familiar with Debian's build infrastructure, it takes quite some effort to
> work out.
> 
> So, the reason why I originally thought (A) is because I was confused and
> thought that "build-arch" was simply "do build tasks that are arch-dependent"
> and the counterpart for "build-indep". Of course, I now realise that this
> interpretation doesn't make sense because arch-indep vs arch-dep tasks might
> overlap in the order they need to be run in. So (A) is actually not coherent,
> but again it takes some effort to work this out.
> 
> The more precise definition of "build-arch" from [2] says "The build-arch
> target must perform all the configuration and compilation required for
> producing all architecture-dependant binary packages".
> 
> If other people are making the similar mistake, it would be useful to add a
> discussion/debunking of that more "intuitive" interpretation to try to
> prevent this.

Dear Ximin,

in my understanding, it is planned that the autobuilders will call “build-arch”
instead of “build” once enough packages support this target.  According to
Lintian's report, it looks like the goal is near reached.

    http://lintian.debian.org/tags/package-would-benefit-from-build-arch-targets.html

I recommend to wait that the behaviour of the autobuilders is changed before
spending some time on the wording.

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan