Bug#904248: Add netbase to build-essential

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Sean Whitton wrote:
> On Wed 25 Jul 2018 at 09:14PM -0700, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

>> Looks okay to me.  As an alternative, we could encourage packages to
>> add an explicit Build-Depends on netbase if they need this
>> functionality.
>>
>> I think in the long run, I would prefer that since it would make the
>> concept of build-essential easier for new packagers to learn.  Can we
>> both make it build-essential and recommend that packages include the
>> Build-Depends (as a policy "should" instead of a "must") to get the
>> best of both worlds?  That way, we'd have a path to eventually
>> simplifying back again.
>
> build-essential is a set of functionality, whereas netbase is a
> particular implementation of some of that functionality.  Coupling a
> requirement in the build-essential set to the current implementation in
> the Debian system would seem to defeat the point of including that
> requirement in the build-essential set.

I don't agree with this logic: if we need a virtual package to
describe network-access-works to abstract away from netbase, that's
very easy to do.

> Another way of looking at this is that right now we have
>
> - build-essential -- functionality you can assume is there
>
> - package upon which you build-depend
>
> but your proposal, if I've understood it correctly, is to add a level in
> between: functionality you can assume is there but nevertheless you
> should build-depend on a package providing that functionality.

Thanks for considering it.  It sounds like there isn't will to migrate
away from netbase in Build-Essential, and if that will materializes
later then it's easy to start then.  It's also possible that at that
point we'd want a different way to declare this kind of build
requirement instead of build-dependencies.  So simply adding netbase
to build-essential today sounds good to me.

Thanks,
Jonathan