On Mon, Feb 09, 2009 at 09:30:48AM +0100, Fabian Greffrath wrote: > Dear -devel,
> I'd like to suggest the introduction of two new control fields to the > source stanza of debian/control, namely Build-Recommends and > Build-Suggests. This is a very bad idea. It interferes with reproducibility of binary builds, which is a very important property of Debian packages. Packages must *not* build differently based on opportunistic discovery of build-dependencies on the system - it's a bug for any package to do so, let alone to be specifically encouraging this behavior with debian/control fields! > A famous example for this would be libasound2-dev, which is only > available for Linux kernels. Currently a build-depends on this package > has to look like this > libasound2-dev [!hurd-i386 !kfreebsd-amd64 !kfreebsd-i386] That is the correct relationship to express. "Ensure libasound2-dev is used on all architectures except for these others" is *not* the same thing as "install libasound2-dev if you can find it". > Why have I added libfaad-dev to the Build-Recommends? Because in > Ubuntu ffmpeg-debian is in the main section, while faad2 is not. So in > order to merge ffmpeg-debian to Ubuntu, the maintainer has to manually > remove this Build-Depends each and every time. As soon as Ubuntu > would support the suggested approach, this would be obsolete. That doesn't sound like a "merge" to me. A real merge, using tools such as Merge-o-Matic (http://merges.ubuntu.com) or a a VCS of choice, shouldn't require that any work be redone for this build-dependency difference. Trying to avoid deltas between Debian and Ubuntu by changing the semantics of build dependencies is a false optimization. It's not a win to save time on merges if it means unreliable build semantics in return. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
