Package: debian-policy Version: 3.9.8 Severity: wishlist Greetings.
Debian Policy 4.9 says: Both binary-* targets should depend on the build target, or on the appropriate build-arch or build-indep target, if provided, so that the package is built if it has not been already. I don't see the point at all: * Autobuilders *always* invoke the build-* targets first. * dpkg-buildpackage *always* invoke the build/build-* target first. * AFAIK, we have never actually supported this way of building packages, and I doubt it would be a good idea to start supporting it now. We should preferably have only one standard way of building a package (debian/rules clean && debian/rules build && debian/rules binary), (and its -arch and -indep variants), not two, of which one of them is tested over and over again by the autobuilders every day and the other is never tested. * Building as root should be discouraged. My proposal to fix this is to remove the requirement that "binary" depends on "build", including the "rationale". I don't know if this proposal will seem controversial, because we have been doing that for ages, so please let us consider all the pros and all the cons. I guess that no package will be affected by this change, because in general removing a requirement does never make policy compliant packages to become non-compliant. Thanks.
