Package: lintian Version: 2.116.3 Severity: normal X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-pyt...@lists.debian.org
The current recommended way for packaging python packages (upstream) is to provide a pyproject.toml file and build with setuptools (python3-setuptools). Debian python package building activates this build method with Build-Depends: dh-python, pybuild-plugin-pyproject There are a number of different ways in which python packages maintain their version (within the package, not the debian version). One of these methods is setuptools_scm, https://github.com/pypa/setuptools_scm/ setuptools_scm is activated by including a [tool.setuptools_scm] section in the package's pyproject.toml file. setuptools_scm often operates by overwriting any existing version.py file that might be present in the source tarball, and in some cases this generates very weird version numbers based on local git tags. That behaviour can be annoying for debian packaging, but setuptools_scm has provided a mechanism to make life easier for package distribution systems. If the environment variable SETUPTOOLS_SCM_PRETEND_VERSION is set, then setuptools_scm does not overwrite the existing version file. This mechanism is documented upstream at https://github.com/pypa/setuptools_scm/ pybuild is smart enough to know about SETUPTOOLS_SCM_PRETEND_VERSION (see /usr/share/perl5/Debian/Debhelper/Buildsystem/pybuild.pm) But it only processes this if python3-setuptools-scm has been included in Build-Depends (more precisely, l.130 if ((grep /python3-(setuptools-scm|hatch-vcs)/, @deps) This behaviour is not obvious, so it's a good opportunity for lintian to help debian python packages, by suggesting to add Build-Depends: python3-setuptools-scm when needed, if it's not already used. The condition could be 1) debian/control has Build-Depends: dh-python, pybuild-plugin-pyproject 2) source has pyproject.toml containing [tool.setuptools_scm] 3) debian/control does not have Build-Depends: python3-setuptools-scm [3b) and debian/rules does not set SETUPTOOLS_SCM_PRETEND_VERSION manually] then emit warning (or error) suggesting to add Build-Depends: python3-setuptools-scm
