Hi, Quoting Jonathan Dowland (2025-05-06 10:51:45) > On Thu May 1, 2025 at 8:37 PM BST, Chris Hofstaedtler wrote: > > Does anything actually _use_ the Build-Essential: yes line? > > I honestly don't know.
I've never seen it being used. > I expect so, or the ftp-masters wouldn't be adding it to packages. I would expect that it is/was needed by software which doesn't want or can resolve dependencies. Same with /usr/share/build-essential/list. The file is redundant as one can just resolve the Depends of the build-essential package. > Having it in the control metadata makes it visible to users (apt show foo). > > I personally feel that splaying the definition of build-essential across > policy; the Depends: of package build-essential; the contents of > /usr/share/build-essential/list; the contents of > /usr/share/build-essential/essential-packages-list *and* FTP overrides > is not ideal (especially since they don't agree), but I'm not currently > planning to work on this. As the maintainer of a couple of packages which rely on what build-depends is, I'd like to see the it defined in Debian policy and the authoritative implementation in the build-essential package. For extra fun in this area there is the topic of turning the build-essential package into a Multi-Arch:same package which can then be used to even be the source of cross-architecture build dependencies. See #815172 Thanks! cheers, josch
signature.asc
Description: signature
