On Wed, May 25, 2022 at 07:55:10PM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > * Drop the bison dependency. > > o Building groff from its distribution archive no longer requires byacc > (or GNU Bison) to be installed. > > * Drop the texinfo dependency. > > o Because all generated forms of groff's Texinfo manual are now included > in the distribution archive, building from that archive no longer > depends on GNU Texinfo or a TeX installation (the latter was only > required for the "doc" target, which had to be explicitly given).
After some thought, I'm going to keep these two build-dependencies after all, as well as adding new build-dependencies on texlive-base and texlive-latex-base. Debian normally prefers to build everything from the original source if possible, even if intermediate forms are shipped in distribution archives. This is of course partly for ideological reasons, but there's a significant practical motivation too: in the event that we need to patch something in a hurry, we don't want to have to figure out the necessary build system changes at the same time (or, worse, have changes appear to be present in the source package but silently have no effect). This is not a theoretical concern: my proposed patch to resolve the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH timezone problem changes doc/groff.texi. It's true that this significantly bloats groff's build-dependency set (especially texlive-base). However, I don't think this will be a problem in practice. For bootstrapping new architectures, we often lean on multiarch these days, and all three of the packages concerned here are "Multi-Arch: foreign" - so it should be possible to satisfy those build-dependencies using binaries from the host architecture when doing a cross-build. If it becomes an issue, we can look at putting these in a "nodoc" profile, although that would probably also need some debian/rules changes so I haven't bothered with it just yet. -- Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwat...@debian.org]
