Package: debian-policy Severity: wishlist Hello.
Policy 7.7 says: (Bold in "can" is mine) Source packages that require certain binary packages to be installed or absent at the time of building the package *can* declare relationships to those binary packages. I interpret this "can" in the sense that this is the vocabulary that the maintainer is allowed to use when writing control files. To my surprise, however, today a maintainer has quoted this "can" word as a rationale for a missing Build-Conflicts not to be a bug of serious severity: "No _must_ directive here. It is not a Policy violation if you don't use Build-Conflicts." If my idea that policy is just describing the vocabulary is close to reality, I would perhaps suggest something like this: The following relationsips are available for source packages to express the fact that they require certain binary packages to be installed or absent at the time of building the package. but then it would be nice to state somewhere later that Build-Depends and Build-Conflicts are not just "optional" but mandatory when the referenced packages are either required to be present or required to be absent. While we are at it, I understand, because it would involve a huge amount of computation to determine, that we can't test every package against every other binary package to discover undeclared build-conflicts. Is there any rule to decide what to put in build-conflicts? Thanks.
