On 10/01/18 01:29, Sam Hartman wrote: > A build profile seems like a great way to express the flag, and like > many things in Debian, the work would fall on those who would benefit > from it.
I think it'd be better to be able to mark a build-dependency as optional, and then implement a mechanism in dpkg to disable the undesired build-dependencies. E.g. if packages start marking libselinux-dev as <optional>, with autoconf or similar automatically disabling selinux support when not present, then a user could build the package with something like dpkg-buildpackage --disable-optional=libselinux-dev. This way we don't need a different build profile for each build-dep and package, which would end up in a mess. Of course we need to change the above syntax to not clash with build profiles, and add DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS support, but you get the point I hope. Seems a lot more standard to me than having each package define its own profiles for each optional dependency. Cheers, Emilio