Dear Adam, Am 29.07.2012 23:16, schrieb Adam D. Barratt:
I did not apply this change but recognize it from Emdebian sprint: Reason is, I believe, to ease bootstrapping new architectures by suppressing build of arch-all packages.
Jonas is right. The main reason for this change was to make it easier to bootstrap the libav package with as little additional (Build-)Dependencies as possible. Libav is involved in several circular dependencies and in the past we got requests by porters to document which B-Ds of libav are actually mandatory and which are optional. Since they are all optional, I suggested a minimal Build-Depends-Bootstrap1 field in README.source, in which I also omitted doxygen.
A few weeks later, when I rebuilt the libav package on my system with "dpkg-buildpackage -d" to test the changes fixing #680602, I found that doxygen is still called, which I found unnecessary and thus removed it.
Hmmm, unless I'm reading the rules files incorrectly, purely running the binary-arch target should already have DTRT without requiring doxygen to be installed. Hence the query, as the change appears to be effectively an unnecessary no-op right now.
Yes, for regular builds which have the full set of B-Ds available, this change is a no-op. But for (1) bootstrapping efforts - which merely need a minimal libav to build other packages which in turn are required to rebuild a full-featured libav - and for (2) quick testings of packaging related changes, this makes a subtle difference.
Best Regards, Fabian