Source: texlive-bin Version: 2020.20200327.54578-5 User: helm...@debian.org Usertags: rebootstrap
Hi Norbert et al, as discussed on irc, I'm working on reducing Build-Depends on packages relevant to architecture bootstrap. texlive-bin is one of the more difficult packages and we agreed that I'm not providing a patch here. What I can tell is: If you perform a full amd64 build of texlive-bin and then turn the following Build-Depends into Build-Conflicts, then a DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=nocheck build produces bit-identical .deb files (as texlive-bin is otherwise reproducible). * libgd-dev * libgs-dev * libncurses5-dev * libpotrace-dev * libwoff-dev * libxxhash-dev * sharutils * texinfo * time The reason for being apparently unused can vary. I've seen the following reasons: * A dependency is really unneeded. It was needed earlier, but is no longer needed and someone forgot to drop it. For instance libpotrace-dev has a use in a component that is explicitly being opted out of building. Maybe it can be dropped entirely. * A dependency is only used for unit testing. If that's what you think, annotate it "<!nocheck>". Any dependency thus tagged becomes irrelevant to architecture bootstrap. However, please ensure that the final result is buildable with DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=nocheck and DEB_BUILD_PROFILES=nocheck (use the --profiles option of sbuild or pbuilder). * Sometimes, a dependency has fallback code. For instance if you depend on xxd to locate it and fall back to using /usr/bin/xxd, then building without this dependency is reproducible, but it should be kept. Similarly, absence of flex or bison can result into source files not being rebuilt. When the previously generated output is close enough, the package will appear to remain reproducible. Please keep such dependencies. Even better, please delete the intermediate results (if possible) before build to ensure that they are rebuilt and to ensure that future tests of droppable dependencies will identify the relevant depenencies as necessary. When in doubt, let us discuss. Thank you for looking into this. Helmut
