> it means that very rarely can Build-Depends-Indep used, and also > that build daemons building only architecture-dependent parts of the > package need often install also everything needed to build the > architecture-independent parts. This is not good.
Right. > However, to make use of the proposal's improvements to the build > system, dpkg-buildpackage and the build daemons will need to be > changed to detect and use the new targets. I will provide a patch > for dpkg-buildpackage, if necessary. A patch to dpkg-buildpackage is sufficient, as the daemons just call dpkg-buildpackage -B. I'd say this should check for presence of separate 'build-arch' and/or 'build-indep' target and use 'build-arch' then instead of 'build'. Otherwise, it falls back to its old behaviour. > + A package may provide one or both of the targets > + <tt>build-arch</tt> and <tt>build-indep</tt>. The Does it make sense to allow one 'build-*' target without the other? If a package can utilize the separation, it needs both anyway. In extreme cases, one of the targets still can be empty. But requiring both makes it easier to test for them. But besides this, I support this proposal. Roman
