Roger Leigh writes ("Re: [buildd-tools-devel] testers wanted: sbuild and build-dependencies"): > The existing approach to determinism is not to support alternatives > at all, which is clearly not ideal. While I don't think we should > be encouraging the use of alternative build-deps, this is one of the > most commonly reported bugs in sbuild--there are valid use cases for > them.
We want better than mere determinism. After all, apt is deterministic (since it does not contain a random number generator). What we want is predictability. In particular, if one writes Build-Depends: lib-new-name | lib-old-name as Goswin suggests, I specifically want that in a suite where lib-new-name is available, it is used. If lib-new-name is available but cannot be installed for some other reason, the build should be blocked or fail. That semantic expectation is violated by a general-purpose heuristic optimiser such as the one in apt/aptitude. Ian. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/19674.52276.962029.611...@chiark.greenend.org.uk