Wouter Verhelst <wou...@debian.org> writes:
> -policy: this is a question that has come up before
> (https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2016/12/msg00470.html is another
> example that springs to mind, but I'm pretty sure there are more), so I
> think we should document in Policy that a) buildd only looks at the
> first dependency in alternative build-dependencies, and b) why this is
> the case.
Policy already says:
While Build-Depends, Build-Depends-Indep and Build-Depends-Arch permit
the use of alternative dependencies, these are not normally used by
the Debian autobuilders. To avoid inconsistency between repeated
builds of a package, the autobuilders will default to selecting the
first alternative, after reducing any architecture-specific
restrictions for the build architecture in question. While this may
limit the usefulness of alternatives in a single release, they can
still be used to provide flexibility in building the same package
across multiple distributions or releases, where a particular
dependency is met by differently named packages.
in 7.1. However, it's hidden in a footnote. Perhaps we should make it
more prominant (and make it clear that it's normative), and tweak the
wording.
--
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
