On Sat, Jun 28, 2014 at 03:31:29PM +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote: > I don't understand. Do you not find it relevant for perl modules to > declare to declare dependencies and build-dependencies > deterministically, or do you find that this particular use of "|" does > not affect determinism?
The latter. When perl or perl-modules provides a virtual package, it will always be installed on the build system as perl+perl-modules are transitively build essential (at least via dpkg-dev -> libdpkg-perl). Thus there's no need to make an undeterministic choice. I can see that there's a chance that this might not be the case at some point in the future. I expect that perl would be very hard to disentangle from the build-essential set in practice, and we may end up declaring it explicitly build-essential anyway. In the specific case of libmodule-build-perl discussed here, that's not even a theoretical possibility: at this point, I think we can be certain that perl-modules will not fall out of the build essential set before libmodule-build-perl stops being a virtual package. In general, I dislike the idea that "unguarded" unversioned dependencies on a virtual package provided by the perl package are somehow wrong. But I suppose the future proofness is an argument for adding the guards, even if I don't think it's worth the bother. -- Niko Tyni nt...@debian.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org