Hi, Sean Whitton wrote: > On Wed 25 Jul 2018 at 09:14PM -0700, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
>> Looks okay to me. As an alternative, we could encourage packages to >> add an explicit Build-Depends on netbase if they need this >> functionality. >> >> I think in the long run, I would prefer that since it would make the >> concept of build-essential easier for new packagers to learn. Can we >> both make it build-essential and recommend that packages include the >> Build-Depends (as a policy "should" instead of a "must") to get the >> best of both worlds? That way, we'd have a path to eventually >> simplifying back again. > > build-essential is a set of functionality, whereas netbase is a > particular implementation of some of that functionality. Coupling a > requirement in the build-essential set to the current implementation in > the Debian system would seem to defeat the point of including that > requirement in the build-essential set. I don't agree with this logic: if we need a virtual package to describe network-access-works to abstract away from netbase, that's very easy to do. > Another way of looking at this is that right now we have > > - build-essential -- functionality you can assume is there > > - package upon which you build-depend > > but your proposal, if I've understood it correctly, is to add a level in > between: functionality you can assume is there but nevertheless you > should build-depend on a package providing that functionality. Thanks for considering it. It sounds like there isn't will to migrate away from netbase in Build-Essential, and if that will materializes later then it's easy to start then. It's also possible that at that point we'd want a different way to declare this kind of build requirement instead of build-dependencies. So simply adding netbase to build-essential today sounds good to me. Thanks, Jonathan
