Steve Greenland wrote: > Hmmm. I tend to think of the first stanza in debian/control as the > "global" stanza, and the rest as "per package". Therefore, the use > of Section/Priority is entirely consistent -- default in the first > stanza, overrides where necessary. Thus, having "Depends" in the global > stanza strikes me as confusing, because there is no connection with the > "Depends" in the rest of the file.
Yes, I tend to look at it that way too. Unfortunatly, I think it's really a mixture of both source and global fields. However, this got me thinking. Antti-Juhani said earlier, referring to indep-depends and arch-depends: Most packages will use only Depends and Conflicts. The other fields are useful with multi-binary packages. Well, if the first stanza is global, how about being able to put the fields in the other stanzas too, to control dependancies on a per-binary-package basis? You would need to name them prefix, though. Something like: Source: foo Section: bar Maintainer: Joey Hess <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Standards-Version: 2.5.0.0 Build-Depends: debhelper Build-Conflicts: evil-package Package: foo-doc Architecture: all Build-Depends: sgml-tools ... Package: foo Architecture: any Build-depends: aalib1g-dev, flex Depends: ${shlibs:Depends} ... So foo-doc needs debhelper and sgml-tools to build, while foo needs debhelper, aalib1g-dev and flex. -- see shy jo