Package: dpkg-dev Version: 1.16.4.2 Severity: wishlist X-Debbugs-CC: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
Dear developers, currently a Debian source package specifies its build dependencies in debian/control; this information gets copied by dpkg-source to the .dsc file. From there it reaches the Source file which is taken into account by our infrastructure, e.g. the build daemons and tools like apt-get build-dep. Therefore, the data in .dsc is the effective copy. I would like to see more flexibility in dpkg-source as to where the effective build depends come from. My use case are (as you might guess) Haskell packages. If you look at http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/h/haskell-yesod/haskell-yesod_1.0.1.6-1.dsc you see it has a very long list of build dependencies. If you’d compare that to http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/yesod/1.0.1.6/yesod.cabal you’d see that the process of creating the build dependencies is a mostly mechanical process and doing that manually is a waste of human developer time and a source for mistakes (which lead to FTBFSes and hence more waste in buildd and buildd admin time). For binary dependencies, thia issue is solved already: Using substvars we leave it to the build process to figure out the correct dependencies. This has worked great so far. I would like to be able to do the same for build dependencies. Here is my suggestion: dpkg-source already supports substvars. What needs to be added: * A dpkg-source option to enable all this, say --enable-control-substvars (meant to go to debian/source/options) * A way to pass the -T option to dpkg-source in debian/source/options (currently not possible, although this is not clearly documented) * When --enable-control-substvars option is enabled, dpkg-source will call "debian/rules source-substvars" after "debian/rules clean" and after creating the debian.tar.gz files, but before creating the .dsc file¹ * When creating the .dsc file, substvars specified in the file specified in -T may be used in Build-Depends and related fields. One downside is that dpkg-source cannot check the build dependencies completely when calling debian/source clean, as it does now, but can only check those that are given directly in debian/rules; at this stage it should just ignore any substvars. Comments? Thanks, Joachim ¹ Why at this stage? Calculating the precise build dependencies might involve building the package. Doing it here allows this build to also be used for creating the binaries, when doing a regular dpkg-buildpackage build. -- Joachim "nomeata" Breitner Debian Developer nome...@debian.org | ICQ# 74513189 | GPG-Keyid: 4743206C JID: nome...@joachim-breitner.de | http://people.debian.org/~nomeata
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