package: debhelper
Hi Niels,
As noted on irc today, it would be nice if debhelper could add support for
handling versioned dependencies between packages in a way that would allow
arch: all binNMUs.
The current practice of using
Package: arch-any
Depends: arch-all (= ${source:Version})
doesn't work if arch-all is binNMUed (because then the version is no longer
the same as the source version).
See also
https://lintian.debian.org/tags/maybe-not-arch-all-binnmuable.html
Having versioned dependencies between arch-all and arch-any is already broken:
Package: arch-all
Depends: arch-any (= ${binary:Version})
Would fail if arch-any is binNMUed.
See
https://lintian.debian.org/tags/not-binnmuable-all-depends-any.html
Some possible ways to handle versioned dependencies that don't have these
issues:
- Add these depends:
Depends: arch_any (>= ${source:Version})
or
Depends: arch_any (>= ${source:Version}),
arch_any (<< ${source:Version}.1~)
This is suggested by lintian, but it hard-codes the assumptions about binNMU
versioning. Also this is wrong when there is an NMU versioned +nmu1, or a
+deb9u1 stable update.
- Create a virtual package and use that as a dependency:
Package: arch-all
Version: 1.0-1+b1
Provides: somevirtualpackage
Package: arch-any
Depends: somevirtualpackage
In this case, somevirtualpackage should be unique for every binary package and
source version, but the same for different versions of the same binary package
built from the same source. It could be something like
virtual-arch-all-1.0-1
- Using versioned provides
Package: some-package
Version: 1.0-1+b1
Provides: some-package (= 1.0-1)
I think this would be a bad idea, because the binNMU is usually done for a
reason, so the new package shouldn't pretend to be the old one, because they
will be different.
Obviously, there might be other ways to handle this.
It would be nice if debhelper could implement a standard way to deal with
these dependencies (whatever way is considered to be the best). However, I
don't know if this can be done with a simple substvar. It probably might need
some kind of macro:
Package: arch-all
Depends: VERSIONED_DEPENDS(arch-any)
In this case, debhelper would need to expand "VERSIONED_DEPENDS(arch-any)" to
the correct dependency (obviously the syntax could be different).
If the handling of versioned dependencies between binaries of the same source
could be handled like this, the substvar ${source:Version} should probably go
away in a future debhelper version, to prevent creating versioned dependencies
that are wrong when arch: all binNMUs are used.
Thanks,
Ivo
