On Wed, Oct 18, 2017 at 00:40:12 -0400, Afif Elghraoui wrote: > Hello, > Currently, we have that packages don't build if any build-dependencies > are not installable. I'd like to suggest that we do the same for > run-time dependencies. > > What ends up happening is that the package itself may build, but then it > never migrates to testing because it's not installable on some of the > architectures that it built on due to some run-time dependency being > missing. > > Examples of this that I know of offhand are canu (due to its indirect > dependency on libssw via mhap) and sga. > > If you look at d/control for sga, it looks like this: > > ~~~https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debian-med/sga.git/tree/debian/control > Priority: optional > Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 10), > dh-autoreconf, > libsparsehash-dev, > zlib1g-dev | libz-dev, > libbamtools-dev, > gawk, > help2man, > # Run-Time Depends > # (to prevent building on architectures where it won't be installable) > samtools, > python, > python-ruffus, > python-pysam > Standards-Version: 4.1.0 > ~~~ > > ...which is an abuse of the build-depends field since those at the > bottom are not actually needed for building the package. > I think this is actually a reasonable use of build-depends. The Depends field in source packages can have a number of substvars that would make any sort of pre-build parsing meaningless.
Cheers, Julien
