Hi all, Over the last few days, I've been looking at Build-Depends and Build-Depends-Indep fields. My original aim was something like trying to have a build path to rebuild the complete archive, with only a Sources file as starting data (basically, src:foo build-depends on libbar-dev in the "Binary" field from src:bar means src:foo depends on src:bar).
I ended up with quite a large number(around 700) of build-depends on packages not listed as binary. The large majority of these are the result of transitions, with the new binary package providing the old one. The most common cases are build-dependencies on libncurses-dev, libz-dev or the various libpng*-dev. Basically, that's the same sort of test as the lintian virtual-package-depends-without-real-package-depends warning, except lintian only checks against the authoritative list of virtual packages, where what I have checks for build-deps (and only build-deps) on anything that is not an actual binary package. Also, the checks give separate results for Build-Depends and Build-Depends-Indep and are for a given arch. So, if a package "Architecture : all" build-depends on one "Architecture : sparc", it will complain for the other arches. Obviously, if an alternative depency is against a real package, it s considered as ok. I have results I will put online as soon as I convert them in a better format than a simple text list, but if you have comments on what to do with this list, they are more than welcome. In the meantime, attached are raw results for the i386 arch. Thanks, Regis
virtual_bd_i386.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data
virtual_bdi_i386.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data
