Hi Paul, Thanks for quick reply.
On Monday 27 February 2012 13:00:32 Paul Wise wrote: > See section 7.1 of debian-policy for examples on how to do that (you > probably want linux-any for the arch): > > http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html Indeed it probably could be written as Build-Depends: libgpm-dev [linux-any] But the obvious drawback would be the requirement to know all architectures where this package is available. In this case Build-Depends configuration will be ineffective against changes. Maintainer will have to track if the package was ported to new architecture and maintaining such relationships may potentially turn into expanded list of architectures. Perhaps it will work beautifully for dependencies which will never be ported. But let's discuss more general case: what if optional dependency is not ported to target architecture yet, or if if is not available in backports? There are might be situations where defining optional build dependencies without architecture wildcard may be more error-proof and easier to maintain. Another case I'm thinking of is when upstream is using unit-testing framework like 'valgrind'. I like to have post-build tests enabled. But this functionality requires an optional dependency. I don't want to risk my package to FTBFS because I put dependency only needed for unit tests to Build-Depends and it is not available on all our platforms. In such case using architecture wildcard is just inappropriate because availability of such package (may) have nothing to do with architecture. Specifically regarding 'libgpm-dev', I've made a list of architectures where it is available (below). At the moment I have no idea what 's390x' is (linux or not) so I have doubts regarding architecture wildcars to use. (OK, I admit I've checked with 'type-handling any linux-gnu' command but I'm still confused how to use architecture wildcards properly in this case) All of this makes me think about the approach to use essential alternative to make sure build will never fail because of my lack of understanding which platform will have the required package. What do you think? libgpm-dev avr32 N hppa N hurd-i386 N kfreebsd-amd64 N kfreebsd-i386 N s390x N alpha Y amd64 Y armel Y i386 Y ia64 Y m68k Y mips Y mipsel Y powerpc Y armhf Y powerpcspe Y s390 Y sh4 Y sparc Y sparc64 Y Regards, Dmitry. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-mentors-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/201202271342.28308.only...@member.fsf.org
