Neil Williams <[email protected]> writes: > Dominique Dumont <[email protected]> wrote:
>> We, sdl maintainers, made a recent change in our package by removing >> unnecessary build depends on -dev packages [1]. > ... at which point you should have looked at the list of reverse > dependencies and done some tests yourselves before uploading ... While this would be nice if Dominique had the time, I disagree with the "should" part of this sentence. Working around bugs in other people's packages shouldn't be a requirement. It's certainly *appreciated* if one wants to go to the work of finding and reporting those bugs, but to me that's a general Debian bug fixing task, not something for which the -dev package maintainer has any special responsibility. > ... which could, arguably, be jointly your fault as this could have been > handled cleanly if done so in advance. Yes, the maintainer of the other > packages made a mistake by relying on indirect dependencies (it's > usually best to build-depend on everything you check for in your > configure stage) but that bug was revealed by your change, so it would > have been helpful to raise this as a problem in advance. For "usually best" please replace "mandatory and required by Policy" except for some cases where packages are *defined* as providing the necessary interfaces as part of their purpose. (dh-autoreconf, for example.) The packages that don't have accurate build dependencies are the ones at "fault" here. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
