Package: cdbs Version: 0.4.122 Severity: normal Tags: patch CDBS provides functionality to automatically update config.sub and config.guess for autotools-using packages during the build. This is good practice and there is growing consensus that this should be automatic for Debian packages (although it is not yet policy).
However this update only occurs if autotools-dev package is installed so that current versions are available in the debian canonical location. autotools-dev is only 'Recommended' by cdbs so on buildds it is not installed during a build, so CDBS-using packages fail to build on new architectures if their autoconf files are out of date (and very many are). This could be fixed in two ways. 1) Make every CDBS-and-autoconf- using package build-dep on autotools-dev, or 2) make cdbs depend on autotools-dev. It seems to me that packages that use CDBS are doing so party because they expect it to take care of this sort of thing. And it does when they test on their local system, where apt will install 'recommends' by default. But it will (quite subtly) fail to take care of this on buildds (or in local sbuild chroots but they won't notice because thier chroots are very unlikely to be for the affected new architectures so builds will still work) because those are set to not install recommends by default. I think the right fix for this is simply to make autotools-dev a proper dependency of CDBS, and not a recommends. Is there any real reason not to take this step? Doing this means that all autotools and CDBS-using packages will generally 'just work' on new architectures if they are capable of doiing so. Trivial patch attached. -- System Information: Debian Release: 7.4 APT prefers stable APT policy: (990, 'stable') Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-kvm-i386-20110111 (SMP w/1 CPU core) Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash cdbs depends on no packages. Versions of packages cdbs recommends: ii autotools-dev 20120608.1 Versions of packages cdbs suggests: ii devscripts 2.12.6+deb7u2 -- no debconf information
diff -Nru cdbs-0.4.122/debian/changelog cdbs-0.4.122+nmu1/debian/changelog --- cdbs-0.4.122/debian/changelog 2013-07-02 09:50:00.000000000 +0100 +++ cdbs-0.4.122+nmu1/debian/changelog 2014-04-16 09:42:01.000000000 +0100 @@ -1,3 +1,10 @@ +cdbs (0.4.122+nmu1) UNRELEASED; urgency=medium + + * Non-maintainer upload. + * Depend on autotools-dev so that CDBS packages build on new architectures + + -- Wookey <[email protected]> Wed, 16 Apr 2014 09:41:05 +0100 + cdbs (0.4.122) unstable; urgency=low * Update and improve references in comments to Perl Policy. diff -Nru cdbs-0.4.122/debian/control cdbs-0.4.122+nmu1/debian/control --- cdbs-0.4.122/debian/control 2013-07-02 09:06:10.000000000 +0100 +++ cdbs-0.4.122+nmu1/debian/control 2014-04-16 09:40:33.000000000 +0100 @@ -25,7 +25,7 @@ Package: cdbs Architecture: all Multi-Arch: foreign -Recommends: autotools-dev +Depends: autotools-dev Suggests: devscripts Description: common build system for Debian packages This package contains the Common Debian Build System, an abstract build diff -Nru cdbs-0.4.122/debian/control.in cdbs-0.4.122+nmu1/debian/control.in --- cdbs-0.4.122/debian/control.in 2013-07-01 19:18:29.000000000 +0100 +++ cdbs-0.4.122+nmu1/debian/control.in 2014-04-16 09:40:50.000000000 +0100 @@ -23,7 +23,7 @@ Package: cdbs Architecture: all Multi-Arch: foreign -Recommends: autotools-dev +Depends: autotools-dev Suggests: devscripts Description: common build system for Debian packages This package contains the Common Debian Build System, an abstract build
