On Sat, 16 Jun 2018 at 18:45:56 +0100, Chris Lamb wrote: > I'm also seeing a bunch of false-positives in the addon checker - > using the dh Python addon shouldn't mean that python can't be in > Build-Depends-Indep. Or dpatch!
Sure - I hadn't intended that you'd add this mechanism for packages that ship debhelper addons alongside other content, just the ones that have little or no purpose other than their debhelper addons, like most/all of the dh-$addon family, and maybe some of the pkg-$team-tools family. > Hm, Simon, are we not already covered by > "clean-should-be-satisfied-by-build-depends" > here? I don't think I got that Lintian warning for a simple use of dh in a package I was looking at recently, but I can't remember which package now... looking at the Lintian source code, it's grepping for patterns, but doesn't seem to detect %: dh --whatever --options as needing debhelper for clean? I think I was mainly approaching this from a different angle than the clean-should-be-satisfied-by-build-depends implementation. clean-should-be-satisfied-by-build-depends tries to detect what is actually needed by 'clean', with a risk of false negatives (not always warning maintainers if they've made debuild -S fail). My idea was to assume that all Build-Depends-* are necessary, make use of the fact that we know certain packages are always or nearly always used via debhelper sequences, and so recommend that those packages move from B-D-* to B-D, with a risk of false positives (putting too many packages in B-D and not enough in B-D-I). I think acting on false positives would be fairly harmless for most of these packages, since they're small, Architecture: all, Multi-Arch: foreign and don't have side-effects by being installed, so having them installed more often isn't going to break cross-compilation or make builds take significantly longer. That reasoning doesn't hold for Architecture: any packages (for which it might complicate cross-compilation) or for documentation toolchains (which can trigger an "expensive" documentation build if packages have automagic dependencies, and can take a lot of time/space to install if they pull in texlive), so those packages should maybe be excluded from this check as a way to mitigate false positives. You're right that the clean-should-be-satisfied-by-build-depends tag is more general than what I proposed in this bug, so the new additions should maybe emit that tag rather than new tags. smcv