On Mon, 3 Nov 2003, Andreas Metzler wrote: > On Mon, Nov 03, 2003 at 07:49:05PM +0100, Santiago Vila wrote: > > [...] I would like to see the real benefits from > > changing the format of debian/rules. > > Did you miss the original subject of the thread? The benefit of the > proposal is to make the split Build-Depends-(Indep) useful at all[1]. > Currently it is not, because the autobuilders invoke the build target, > which in turn invokes build-arch and build-indep, so you have to put > anything needed for building in Build-Depends, as the autobuilders > will uselessly build the build-indep target. > > The -indep targets can be rather expensive, executing tex and other > stuff and requiing installing rather big packages. > > I might be misunderstanding you, and you are actually asking for a > list of packages that would benefit from the proposal.
An estimation of the number, more than a list. > - I don't think > that is easy to generate, as it requires checking debian/rules by > hand, we have just libtool as example. > cu andreas > [1] Currently this is only possible with ugliness like making > build-indep an empty target and doing the actual expensive work in > binary-indep, Some of the packages I maintain use texi2html in the binary-indep target (and they have texi2html in Build-Depends-Indep). Why is such thing an ugliness? It is because it runs under root/fakeroot or are there any other reason? > or ignoring policy's recommendation to make build depend > on build-arch and build-indep. Which is what I would call complexity for very little gain. Packages which do not benefit from a split build-arch / build-indep (and there are certainly a lot of packages which do not benefit) should continue to be allowed not to have such targets, without people or policy saying they are following a "deprecated format" or anything like that. Does this clarify my point? What about optional fields in the control file with default values: Build-Arch: build Build-Indep: build (and therefore may be omitted), but that can be overridden in this way?: Build-Arch: build-arch Build-Indep: build-indep only for packages which really need or benefit from them? (What I dislike is a "format version", mandatory conversion of all packages to the new format in the long run, and all that).
