Bug#1002626: debian-policy: building packages should not require to be root
Sean Whitton <spwhitton@spwhitton.name> writes:
> I said that the requirement is only advisory based on how there is no
> requirement on packages expressed must/should/etc. in the description of
> Rules-Requires-Root: no in Policy. The target of the advice would be
> authors and maintainers of package builders.
> However, I missed the use of "required" in the text, which means there
> is in fact a Policy requirement not to fail to build as non-root when
> this field value is declared, I think?
> Sorry for causing some confusion here.
Oh, no problem at all, and that makes sense.
FWIW, I think Policy requirements may be the wrong way of thinking about
this problem. If I try to compile a Perl module with GCC in debian/rules,
I would be hard-pressed to name a specific Policy requirement that
violates, but the package wouldn't build and that's a FTBFS bug. This
feels more like that: the package metadata says to build it as non-root,
which means that if it doesn't build as non-root, that's a FTBFS bug.
Anyway, it all seems to be sorted out now, and I suspect the root problem
was some benign misunderstanding of the root cause Vincent's bug report.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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