Hi, Sean Whitton wrote: > On Thu, Nov 30 2017, Simon McVittie wrote:
>> Other than that, seconded. I'm not sure whether this is necessarily >> how the autobuilders *should* work, but there's value in documenting >> how the autobuilders *do* work. > > Thank you for reviewing this bug. > > Since Sean's patch doesn't require anything of package maintainers, it's > what we call "informative", and we don't need formal seconds. So I'm > going to go ahead and apply the patch. Thanks. As a followup, I'm a little confused at what I think is a wording issue: > + To avoid > + inconsistency between repeated builds of a package, the > + autobuilders will default to selecting the first alternative, after > + reducing any architecture-specific restrictions for the build > + architecture in question. While this may limit the usefulness of > + alternatives in a single release, they can still be used to provide > + flexibility in building the same package across multiple > + distributions or releases, where a particular dependency is met by > + differently named packages. This means if I write Build-Depends: a | b then it will always use 'a', regardless of the release, right? What is the comment about providing flexibility talking about here? Is it saying that I can use 'a | b' to provide flexibility for people building outside an autobuilder environment? To help backporters, I have used this functionality before and backporters have uploaded the package as-is to a backports dist that didn't include 'a'. The package built against 'b'. Was this an autobuilder bug? Thanks, Jonathan