Hi. This probably has been covered before, but it's so consistently annoying that I'd like to bring it up again.
Currently the Debian build tools strongly encourage packages to have exactly Build-Depends: debhelper-compat (= 13) This works fine if you're building for Debian/sid in 2022. It does not work in any other context. I have a very common use case: at work I'm maintaining several APT repos for the packages we use for several distros (the last few releases of Debian and Ubuntu). The latest Debian already has the packages in it, so the Build-Depends line is exactly as above. But this means that building the package for any of the older releases fails. And if I say something reasonable like Build-Depends: debhelper-compat (>= 11) Then this happens when building the package on sid: dh: warning: Found invalid debhelper-compat relation: debhelper-compat (>= 11) dh: warning: * Please format the relation as (example): debhelper-compat (= 13) dh: warning: * Note that alternatives, architecture restrictions, build-profiles etc. are not supported. dh: warning: * If this is not possible, then please remove the debhelper-compat relation and insert the dh: warning: compat level into the file debian/compat. (E.g. "echo 13 > debian/compat") dh: error: Could not parse desired debhelper compat level from relation: debhelper-compat (>= 11) make: *** [debian/rules:8: clean] Error 255 It isn't helpful. Most packages (including mine) are very vanilla, and there isn't any difference between debhelper 11 or 12 or 13. I'm having to patch debian/control every time I do a build, and this isn't a useful use of my time. Can we please loosen this in some way? Thanks!
