Package: doxygen Version: 1.8.11-1 Hello Matthias.
When doxygen calls "dot", it does not seem to check for errors. As a result, nearly every package using doxygen for documentation is implicitly breaking Policy 4.6, "Error trapping in makefiles". Policy 4.6 says that whenever a Makefile finds an error, the build process should stop to ensure that we don't generate the package incorrectly. As an example, consider the two attached build logs. The first one is a normal run of "dpkg-buildpackage -A" for the "apt" package in stretch (apt uses docygen). The second one is the same, but replacing the "dot" command by the "false" command before the build: cp /bin/false /usr/bin/dot You will see that the second build log is full of messages like this one: error: Problems running dot: exit code=1, command='/usr/bin/dot' but the build does not stop, and the final packages generated in the second build do not contain a single "svg" file. Both builds, however, have a line at the end saying: Status: successful which is precisely what Policy 4.6 was trying to avoid. Of course, replacing the "dot" command by "false" is a little bit extreme, but it completely shows the point that doxygen does not check for errors. I first discovered this by building packages with low memory, but there is not in fact a single reason why programs may fail, we should trap for errors in the build processes whatever their reasons to fail might be. I'm not setting any particular severity for this bug, but IMHO a bug which makes a lot of other packages to violate a "must" directive in policy should probably be higher than normal. I leave it to you. Thanks.
apt_1.2.6_amd64-20160316-1645.A.gz
Description: application/gzip
apt_1.2.6_amd64-20160316-1645.B.gz
Description: application/gzip
