control: tag -1 +pending Hello Santiago, On Mon 16 May 2016 at 08:16PM +0200, Santiago Vila wrote: > Policy 7.7 says: (Bold in "can" is mine) > > Source packages that require certain binary packages to be installed > or absent at the time of building the package *can* declare > relationships to those binary packages. > > I interpret this "can" in the sense that this is the vocabulary that > the maintainer is allowed to use when writing control files. > > To my surprise, however, today a maintainer has quoted this "can" word > as a rationale for a missing Build-Conflicts not to be a bug of serious > severity: > > "No _must_ directive here. It is not a Policy violation if you don't > use Build-Conflicts." This maintainer's interpretation matches how I'd understand the quoted wording from 7.7. > If my idea that policy is just describing the vocabulary is close to > reality, I would perhaps suggest something like this: > > The following relationsips are available for source packages to > express the fact that they require certain binary packages to be > installed or absent at the time of building the package. I tried implementing something like this wording, but I don't think it reads any better, when considered as part of the section as a whole. What I've done instead is replace 'can' with 'may', which is the standard Policy language to express that things are optional. > but then it would be nice to state somewhere later that Build-Depends > and Build-Conflicts are not just "optional" but mandatory when the > referenced packages are either required to be present or required to > be absent. > > > While we are at it, I understand, because it would involve a huge > amount of computation to determine, that we can't test every package > against every other binary package to discover undeclared > build-conflicts. Well, indeed. In fact, this is the reason why I don't see how we could introduce a requirement to use Build-Conflicts into Policy. We would not be able to determine whether we were making packages buggy by doing that. Thus, I'm marking this bug as done with the s/can/may/ change, since I don't think the normative change is one we can feasibly make. -- Sean Whitton
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