Package: debian-policy
Version: 3.7.2.2
Severity: wishlist
Tags: patch

The suggestions given in Policy 4.9 about a build target being empty
and the binary target depending on other build targets seems a bit
wrong - why would the build target itself not depend on the other
targets?  I suggest a patch below, wording is borrowed from a paragraph
about the binary target.

This is not really a functional change, just explaining best practices.
It's also not officially a proposal, as my key isn't in the keyring.

Peter

--- policy.sgml
+++ policy.sgml
@@ -1738,17 +1738,10 @@
              </p>
 
              <p>
-               For some packages, notably ones where the same
-               source tree is compiled in different ways to produce
-               two binary packages, the <tt>build</tt> target
-               does not make much sense.  For these packages it is
-               good enough to provide two (or more) targets
-               (<tt>build-a</tt> and <tt>build-b</tt> or whatever)
-               for each of the ways of building the package, and a
-               <tt>build</tt> target that does nothing.  The
-               <tt>binary</tt> target will have to build the
-               package in each of the possible ways and make the
-               binary package out of each.
+               <tt>build</tt> may be (and commonly is) a target with
+               no commands which simply depends on <tt>build-arch</tt>
+               and <tt>build-indep</tt> (see below), or on other
+               targets split from <tt>build</tt> for readability.
              </p>
 
              <p>

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