Hello Jonathan, On Thu, Nov 30 2017, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
> 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? Not quite; see below. > 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? I think this is included: this is another sense of flexibility it provides. > 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? The backports autobuilders pass --build-dep-resolver=aptitude to sbuild, which (I believe) causes them to use alternative dependencies. -- Sean Whitton
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