Ian Jackson dijo [Thu, Oct 05, 2017 at 01:29:16PM +0100]: > I have also heard of packages which do "apt-get source" in their rules > files. > > I think that both of these activities are reasonable things to do. > They don't violate the self-containedness of Debian. If they are > technically forbidden by policy then policy should be changed. There > should be an exception saying that a package build may access the > Debian archive (and ideally it should specify how this should be > done.) If someone cares enough to document this situation then they > can file the bug against policy. > > Of course it would be better if we had a more declarative way of > saying "this package needs foo.deb to build - and we mean the .deb, > not for foo to be installed", and the corresponding "this package > needs the source code for bar". But this is rather a niche, and it > doesn't seem to cause trouble in practice. So AFAICT it's no-one > priority.
UGH. I am not convinced this use case should be supported - Even if the software providers are ourselves, which we trust not to trojan our own goodies, this still allows for a great deal of nondeterminism. If the "apt-get source"d package is updated, the build might not work anymore or might yield different results.