On Tue, Feb 02, 2016 at 10:25:07PM +1300, Daniel Reurich wrote: > > debian-installer-netboot-images source package is less than 6k in size. > > Clearly the main part of the resulting binary packages come from > > fetching resources over the network (apparently using wget). > Correct. And there are good reason for this. One should be able to > build the package for another release without using that release for the > build environment. The build process requires downloading but not > installing udebs for use in the installer, as well as debs which are > used to provide parts like glibc, kernel etc and they are not installed > but the required components extracted and mostly having the symbols > stripped (to reduce the resulting binary size) and all these parts are > assembled into the installer image.
There is no requirement to be able to build the package for another release than the current build environment. Now, within Debian, that's a bit more fuzzy than it should be, but the point is that you're supposed to build a package for the current distribution of the chroot. > Perhaps Debian Policy §4.2 should be amended to either carve out an > exception for debian installer and similar packages or a more generic > exception such that it only applies to the binary debs and not other > build artifacts. > > Either that or Debian will have to implement a different solution for > building the installer images. YMMV I guess it's clear that the current state for both the netboot images and debian-installer itself is suboptimal. But it's not unheard of that certain packages need to ignore the rules for a while to eventually become compliant. (Which might mean RC bug and *-ignore tags.) Kind regards Philipp Kern