Package: apt Version: 2.5.5 Severity: wishlist Hi!
On a thread on debian-devel, Adrian Bunk brought up the potential problem of packages with a Build-Conflicts against a «Protected/Important: yes» package. To me it makes sense that the tooling should be able to cover this theoretical problem automatically, when the build is happening on a discardable system (such as in a chroot or an ephemeral VM). On a practical note, I think I'd find upsetting if the particular example brought up (e2fsprogs) was to be added as a Build-Conflicts of any package, as that pretty much means it would be unsafe to build such package on your main system if your filesystem is extN, and IMO that package would deserve a bug report. I checked the code and I find in apt-pkg/deb/dpkgpm.cc the config variable pkgCacheGen::Protected being used, but I'm not sure I understand how it is intended to be used? The code returns true for "none" and "native" and when the "Important" flags is not-zero, but «doc/examples/configure-index» also mentions an "all" value which does not seem to be handled here? Shouldn't the "none" mean to return false? If this is already supported by that option I'd request documentation for it, or otherwise support for a similar option to control this would be nice. Then a build-driver such as sbuild or pbuilder could disable that option when and iff it knows it is driving the build inside a discardable system. Thanks, Guillem