Hello, On Wed 17 Nov 2021 at 11:10AM +01, Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues wrote: > Source: debian-policy > Version: 4.6.0.1 > Severity: normal > X-Debbugs-Cc: josch@debian.org > > Hi, > > currently, footnote [1] of §7 states: > >> While Build-Depends, Build-Depends-Indep and Build-Depends-Arch permit >> the use of alternative dependencies, these are not normally used by the >> Debian autobuilders. To avoid inconsistency between repeated builds of a >> package, the autobuilders will default to selecting the first >> alternative, after reducing any architecture-specific restrictions for >> the build architecture in question. While this may limit the usefulness >> of alternatives in a single release, they can still be used to provide >> flexibility in building the same package across multiple distributions >> or releases, where a particular dependency is met by differently named >> packages. > > There are multiple problems with this footnote: > > 1. "they are not normally used by the Debian autobuilders" should > instead be "they are never used by the Debian autobuilders" or it > should state when they are used and when they are not > > 2. the above also omits that they are used in situations where an > alternative has the form pkgA (rel ver1) | pkgA (rel ver2) > > 3. "To avoid inconsistency between repeated builds" suggests that this > measure avoids inconsistency. It does avoid some but since it doesn't > avoid all, it's wrong to say that it does avoid consistency. > Inconsistency is still created by alternatives of binary packages and > by virtual packages. > > So maybe the above can be improved? Here is a suggested new wording for > the first part of the footnote: > >> While Build-Depends, Build-Depends-Indep and Build-Depends-Arch permit >> the use of alternative dependencies, these are discarded by the Debian >> autobuilders, after reducing any architecture-specific restrictions for >> the build architecture in question, except when the later alternative >> has the same package name as the first alternative. This is to improve >> consistency between repeated builds of a package while still allowing >> version ranges of the same package. Can you turn this into a patch against our git repo, please? -- Sean Whitton
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