The stats: 8,920 source packages in Debian unstable main. 8,254 declare a build-dependency on debhelper
= 92% of packages build-depend on debhelper.
Is that sufficient to declare it build-essential?
The downside:
Package: debhelper
Depends: perl (>= 5.6.0-16), coreutils | fileutils (>= 4.0-2.1),
file (>= 3.23-1), dpkg-dev (>= 1.7.0), html2text,
debconf-utils (>= 1.1.1), binutils, po-debconf
However:
perl provides perl5 which is a dependency of dpkg-dev, which is
build-essential
coreutils/fileutils is already Essential
dpkg-dev (albeit an earlier versioned dependency) is already
build-essential
binutils is a dependency of gcc-3.3, which is build-essential
This means:
debhelper would be build-essential
by dependency; file, html2text, debconf-utils & po-debconf would also
become build-essential
and their dependencies (etc.)
It can be argued that these are already effectively build-essential due
to the high number of packages build-depending on them anyway.
What say you?
Scott
--
Have you ever, ever felt like this?
Had strange things happen? Are you going round the twist?
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