On 20010423T091432-0500, Steve Greenland wrote: > It's been discussed before. The problem is that most > debhelper Build-Depends actually need to be versioned[1], which won't > work with build-essential.
That's not the real reason. Take the definition of build-essential packages from policy. It specifies that the list will not cantain any packages that are optional in building a package that contains a C or C++ program. It should be clear to everybody that debhelper is not required (there are developers who don't use debhelper - consider in contrast dpkg-dev, which everybody needs) and thus not essential. IMHO, it'd be more in line with the philosophy of build-essentiality to remove the C and C++ compilers from the list than to add debhelper. But both changes will require policy amendments. Antti-Juhani, the build-essential maintainer who is behind in his Debian mail (busy IRL) -- %%% Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho % [EMAIL PROTECTED] % http://www.iki.fi/gaia/ %%%
