Package: debootstrap Version: 1.0.81 Severity: normal Hi,
in Debian, every binary package implicitly depends on all binary packages marked as Essential:yes and every source package implicitly build-depends on the binary package build-essential. Policy ยง4.2 says: | it must be possible to build the package and produce working binaries | on a system with only essential and build-essential packages installed | and also those required to satisfy the build-time relationships | (including any implied relationships). Currently, programs in Debian that facilitate building source packages in "clean" environments like sbuild and pbuilder use debootstrap to create this "minimal" environment. Specifically, they use the buildd variant provided by debootstrap. Unfortunately it seems that in addition to installing the minimum required packages (all Essential:yes, build-essential and (unfortunately necessarily) apt), debootstrap also installs all packages marked as Priority:required (and their transitive dependencies). Thus, it can easily happen that source packages in Debian do not correctly declare their build dependencies on packages that are Priority:required because they happen to always be installed in virtually any environment that the source package will probably ever be built in (because they were all created by debootstrap). I think this is a bug in the package list installed by the buildd variant. Since the buildd variant is meant to provide a clean and minimal environment to build source packages, it should try hard not to install any extra packages which would then make it impossible to test whether a source package is policy compliant in the build dependencies it declares. Thank you! cheers, josch
