Re: FTBS bugs -- MBF?

[Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org>]

On Sun, 02 Oct 2022 at 10:16:00 +0200, Sebastiaan Couwenberg wrote:
> On 10/2/22 04:23, Adam Borowski quoted Policy:
> > # "clean"
> > #    Only the "Build-Depends" and "Build-Conflicts" fields must be
> > #    satisfied when this target is invoked.
> 
> Shouldn't Build-Depends-Indep be considered as part of Build-Depends?

I think that would defeat the purpose of splitting B-D, B-D-I and B-D-A.
A common reason to use B-D-I is that building documentation needs a
relatively "heavy" tool like doxygen, gtk-doc or TeX, which is time-
and space-consuming to install and harder to satisfy during architecture
bootstrapping.

If we required B-D-I to be satisfied for clean, then that would mean
the documentation tool would be required when running dpkg-buildpackage -B,
which expands to somethng similar to

    debian/rules clean
    debian/rules build-arch
    debian/rules binary-arch

That would have the same practical result as moving everything from
B-D-I to B-D.

> Packages that only build Architecture: all binary packages tend to use
> Build-Depends-Indep.

Policy is quite clear about that being a bug. I think a better rule of
thumb for maintainers in a hurry would be: if you don't have time to think
about which dependency list is the right one, and preferably test the
result (with a source-only build like Adam has been doing, a --build=all
build, and a --build=any build), then the safe option is to put everything
in B-D.

    smcv