On Tue, Jan 28, 2003 at 08:11:34PM +0100, Bas Zoetekouw wrote:
> Package: debian-policy
> Version: 3.5.8.0
> Severity: important
>
> Currently, policy says that following about Build-Depends-Indep (section
> 7.6):
>
> | The Build-Depends-Indep and Build-Conflicts-Indep fields must be
> | satisfied when any of the following targets is invoked: build, clean,
> | build-indep, binary and binary-indep.
>
> This makes no sense, because it would mean that Build-Depends-Indep
> dependencies would have to be installed anyway (for clean target for
> example) even when building only the arch-dependent binary packages.
Sorry, it is correct. See the footnote to that section. If you're
building the arch-dependent binary packages using binary-arch, then
you don't need the Build-Depends-Indep packages, and if you do, then
you have a FTBFS serious bug.
> | <ifvoid> The Build-Depends-Indep and Build-Conflicts-Indep fields must
> | be satisfied when any of the following targets is invoked: build,
> | clean, build-indep, binary and binary-indep.
> | <ifvoid> note that that includes build
Correct.
> | <elmo> policy is broken
> | <BenC> way broken
> | <ifvoid> ok
> | <BenC> that's just stupid
> | <BenC> that pretty much says that indep needs to always be satisfied,
> | which makes indep useless
No: if binary-arch depends (in a Makefile sense) on build, then you're
not actually "invoking" build, and your make can do what it likes, as
long as you only need the Build-Depends packages. If you make build,
then you should require both Build-Depends and Build-Depends-Indep. I
know that's not what the autobuilders yet do, but one day they might
check for the existence of the build-arch target, and fall back to a
build target if that doesn't exist. At that point, the distinction
will make sense; the way the Build-Depends{,-Indep} fields were
originally designed or implemented was fundamentally broken, in that
the -Indep fields were useless.
Julian
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