Control: forcemerge 677474 -1
Control: retitle -1 dpkg-dev: support substvars in Build-Depends
On Fri, 2014-06-13 at 19:12:25 +0200, Guillem Jover wrote:
> On Thu, 2014-06-12 at 22:40:40 +0200, Helmut Grohne wrote:
> > Package: dpkg-dev
> > Version: dpkg_1.17.10
> > Severity: wishlist
> > Tags: patch
> > User: helm...@debian.org
> > Usertags: rebootstrap
>
> > Let us revisit a less intrusive variant of #677474. My request is to
> > enable interpolation of ${source:Version} in Build-Depends and friends.
> > Of course this arises from a practical need:
> >
> > Quite a few packages use the binaries created in the process of building
> > the package. A primary example affecting 200 packages is help2man.
> > Unfortunately those binaries are not always executable. Most notably
> > they are not executable when cross compiling. Rather than resorting to
> > ugly hacks it would be nice to just use the build version of those tools
> > to generate manual pages or facilitate other tasks. In most cases that
> > would amount to:
> >
> > Source: foo
> > Build-Depends: foo <profile.cross>
> >
> > In many cases this would be correct, but ideally we want to ensure that
> > the manual pages created match the source. So the dependency needs to be
> > rather stricter:
> >
> > Build-Depends: foo (= ${source:Version}) <profile.cross>
> >
> > This use of substvars would not pose any problems for regular
> > build-ability of the package, because the dependency is not evaluated in
> > the absence of the cross profile.
>
> While this is strictly true, it's still problematic. It unconditionally
> adds the substvars in dpkg-source, which opens for the possibility of
> accidental misuse, it also can only set correctly the source:Version,
> not the binary:Version substvar. Also dpkg-checkbuilddeps does not
> have any kind of knowledge about substvars, so it will then become
> unusable when cross-compiling those packages.
>
> TBH, I've always found the help2man usage dubious, because it usually
> adds marginal information to something that's already available through
> just «cmd --help», and seems prone to cause problems. It feels to just
> be there to satisfy the Debian desire for a man page per binary.
>
> I'd rather see this specific problem solved in a way that benefits
> upstream, so either changing their build system to build for the
> host and build systems, so that help2man can be used even when
> cross-building, or by switching away from help2man and providing
> static man pages.
Given the above, that this ends up having the same problems as the
other general bug, and that the specific case of help2man was agreed
in the bootstrap sprint in Paris to be fixed in a different way, I'm
merging these bug reports.
Thanks,
Guillem
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-dpkg-bugs-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
