Re: Make alternative build-depends work on backports buildds (was: Give back ktorrent in squeeze-backports)

[Kurt Roeckx <kurt@roeckx.be>]

On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 09:06:44PM +0300, Modestas Vainius wrote:
> > I'm not sure what you're trying to say, but we don't use the apt
> > or aptitude resolvers, we use the internal one.  Except for
> > experimental which uses the aptitude resolver.
> 
> Backport buildds use aptitude resolver. For example:

Ok, I didn't know that.  I guess it makes sense.

> I would like to maintain a list of Build-Depends which would work on both 
> sid/wheezy and squeeze. Due to changes in the qt4-x11/qtwebkit packaging, I 
> add:
> 
> libqtwebkit-dev | libqt4-dev (<< 4:4.7.0)
> 
> to Build-Depends. libqtwebkit-dev is for sid/wheezy while libqt4-dev (<< 
> 4:4.7.0) is for squeeze. Sure I could probably fix this by removing 
> alternative build-depends but maybe sbuild could be configured/upgraded to 
> handle these alternatives dependencies on backports buildds properly? Or is it 
> a very unresonable request and why?

We will only consider the first alternative, so that we have
reproducible results.

> Since sbuild 0.61.0 dominates on the buildds, you can fix the problem by
> adding "$resolve_alternatives = 1" to ~/.sbuildrc. The changelog entry
> suggests doing the same so it is a very good idea to add it in general. I have
> tested this solution and I can confirm that it works fine with 0.61.0:

I wonder why they're not all using the same version.

But we have always decided to do it this way, and there was a
thread about it like a few months ago, probably around the time
0.61.0 got released.

> Alternatively, sbuild 0.62.5-1 works well on my system without any further 
> tweaks (because aptitude resolver is smarter). So you can also upgrade sbuild 
> to the later version to fix the problem (this helps since libqtwebkit-dev does 
> not exist in squeeze as per changelog). Still adding "$resolve_alternatives = 
> 1" does not hurt.

If you want to make the buildds use 0.62, someone is going to need
to put time in it to test that it actually works on the buildds.

I'm also not sure we want to use the aptitude resolver in that
case.


Kurt