Source dependencies
It is becoming clear from our porting bootstrapping efforts and
various other things that source dependencies are probably required.
When the new source format was designed this issue was discussed and
we decided to defer it until we thought we kew how to solve it and
whether it was needed.
Various schemes have been proposed for determining source dependencies
automatically, but I think these are probably impractical or
unreliable.
Consequently, I've come to the conclusion that we should have source
dependencies in the .dsc file, determined by hand by the package
maintainer. We can check these automatically (with sufficient
computing power and disk space) if need be, but most mistakes will
turn up fairly quickly as part of porting efforts &c and when fixed
will then produce useful information for use in further ports &c.
The syntax would be
Source-Depends: <dependency-specs as in ordinary dependency field>
in the .dsc file (NOT in the .deb control file).
As for an ordinary dependency, Essential packages should not be
listed. Convention ought to be that only the compiler and not the
libc ought to be listed, so that dependencies on libc versions are not
hardwired unless they're really true.
Opinions ?
Ian.
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