On Fri, 23 Nov 2012, Colin Watson wrote:
It also occurred to me that gettext should depend on libasprintf-dev and libgettextpo-dev, otherwise anything that Build-Depends on gettext expecting to be able to use one of those libraries will immediately FTBFS. Perhaps it will be possible to get rid of this dependency later after a migration period, as in some ways it's a bit odd for gettext to suck in development libraries.
I also thought about that, but the names of the new packages have been in gettext Provides for a long time, which means any package which fails to build properly because of this split was already buggy in the first place. Moreover, somebody in this same thread, if I remember will, did a check and found that there were no packages affected, so my preference would be to not add those Depends if they are not necessary for our own packages.
I've confirmed that these -dev packages are multiarch-coinstallable, which is good. There is one remaining niggle here: while /usr/share/info/autosprintf.info.gz is currently identical across architectures, it starts with a line containing "produced by makeinfo version 4.13". That means that if gettext ever happens to be built when texinfo is at different upstream versions on different architectures, the results will not be multiarch-coinstallable. I think this is a bit of a timebomb and we should avoid it. Perhaps it would make sense to leave that info documentation in the gettext package, and add a "Suggests: gettext" in libasprintf-dev? (We could move it to gettext-doc instead, but that seems like fairly pointless deckchair-rearrangement to me.) I'd like to get this into Ubuntu as soon as possible to replace our current "Multi-Arch: allowed" hack in sufficient time to undo all the build-dependencies we've accumulated on "gettext:any". Do you think it might be possible to have this patch applied in experimental, or should we apply it ourselves once we've agreed on package names and contents?
Perhaps we should probably do the split in Debian unstable, as multiarch is a release goal for wheezy. Are splits already forbidden in unstable? -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
