Re: request: check installability of Depends before building
On Wed, Oct 18, 2017 at 00:40:12 -0400, Afif Elghraoui wrote:
> Hello,
> Currently, we have that packages don't build if any build-dependencies
> are not installable. I'd like to suggest that we do the same for
> run-time dependencies.
>
> What ends up happening is that the package itself may build, but then it
> never migrates to testing because it's not installable on some of the
> architectures that it built on due to some run-time dependency being
> missing.
>
> Examples of this that I know of offhand are canu (due to its indirect
> dependency on libssw via mhap) and sga.
>
> If you look at d/control for sga, it looks like this:
>
> ~~~https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debian-med/sga.git/tree/debian/control
> Priority: optional
> Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 10),
> dh-autoreconf,
> libsparsehash-dev,
> zlib1g-dev | libz-dev,
> libbamtools-dev,
> gawk,
> help2man,
> # Run-Time Depends
> # (to prevent building on architectures where it won't be installable)
> samtools,
> python,
> python-ruffus,
> python-pysam
> Standards-Version: 4.1.0
> ~~~
>
> ...which is an abuse of the build-depends field since those at the
> bottom are not actually needed for building the package.
>
I think this is actually a reasonable use of build-depends. The Depends
field in source packages can have a number of substvars that would make
any sort of pre-build parsing meaningless.
Cheers,
Julien
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