On Thu, 2020-01-16 at 08:50 -0800, Daniel Schepler wrote: > These are where I found that having extra packages installed during > the dpkg-buildpackage run either failed or resulted in broken > packages. (Some examples of the type of thing I mean: #948522, > #887902.)
If you build outside a controlled environment the set of additional packages are just a small part of your worries. There are others such as - more creative solutions to satisfy Build-Depends, - anything in /usr/local, - anything in /opt (if PATH or other configuration includes /opt), - which alternative is active, - diversions, - local configuration, including environment variables (PATH, variables changing behavior of the Python interpreter, ...), - modified files, - local packages that do not exist in Debian's archive, or - modified packages. In many cases this will not be a problem, but trying to make any guarantees that the package building process will still work reliably seems to be a lost cause to me. It is fine to ask a maintainer to include some `--disable-something` flag if this is easy to do and reasonably likely to be a problem, but I would not expect people to actively spend effort on this. Ansgar
