Tim Retout <t...@retout.co.uk> writes: > This is correct; however, having read bug #552200, I'm not yet > personally convinced that it deserved to be removed. If the package > later added some arch-dependent binary packages, it would be nice to be > consistent.
The basic problem is that while there's potentially some use to the idea of separating out architecture-independent build requirements, Lintian wasn't really checking that. In order to support this, you have to very carefully structure your debian/rules so that the architecture-independent parts aren't run by the buildds. (Which, at the moment, is actually impossible since the buildds don't use build-arch.) All Lintian was looking at was architecture-independent packages, which is pointless since there's no reason to build an architecture-independent package unless you want the architecture-independent binary packages. Even if such a package converted to mixed architecture, chances are this would immediately mean that everything listed in Build-Depends-Indep is now required in Build-Depends, so the work that you did to separate them is now wrong and has to be undone. > (I think I could envisage an automated Perl package building tool that > would love to be able to install automatically just the packages needed > to run the clean rule - I shall write such a script in my copious free > time and then complain bitterly to the lintian maintainers.) That's a different problem than Build-Depends-Indep was intended to solve, though. In general, I think situations where the only target you want to run is the clean rule are actually bugs. In particular, dpkg-source is buggy (already reported) in that it requires that you run the clean target before building the source package when doing anything other than an architecture-limited build. This is wasted effort when what one is building a source package from is an export from a VCS, such as with any of the *-buildpackage tools, and creates an artificial requirement for packages that have to be installed outside the build chroot just to run the clean target to create a source package to move into the build chroot. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-mentors-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org