On Thu, Jan 18, 2018 at 06:52:57PM +0100, Emilio Pozuelo Monfort wrote:
> 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.
When the sole purpose of a rebuild is to get rid of unused library(ies),
the rebuild only makes sense if this is supported throughout the whole
distribution.
The problematic cases are the non-trivial ones,
and what support Debian wants to provide for that.
It would make the life for the Devuan people much easier if Debian
would be committed to have *all* packages in buster build and work
with --disable-optional=libsystemd-dev.
Are you as release manager willing to make this a supported feature
for buster, with breakages being RC bugs?
For small embedded systems, having this only for one library
doesn't bring that many benefits.
For how many libraries are you release manager willing to make
--disable-optional a supported feature for buster, with breakages
being RC bugs?
It is really important to look at it top-down from what Debian
wants to officially support in the end - these technical details
only matter if Debian will officially support rebuilding the
whole archive of a stable release with fewer libraries.
> Cheers,
> Emilio
cu
Adrian
--
"Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
"Only a promise," Lao Er said.
Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed
