Package: lintian Version: 2.115.3 Severity: wishlist X-Debbugs-Cc: Joe Nahmias <j...@nahmias.net>, Jelmer Vernooij <jel...@debian.org>
Hi, Joe noticed a repetitive cross build failure. Can we turn that into a lintian check? Preconditions * A source package builds an architecture-dependent binary package. * The package Build-Depends: python([0-9.]*|3?(-all))-dev without any :native or :any qualifier. The assumption is that in this case, the package very likely builds a Python extension module. For doing so, it needs a build architecture Python interpreter and a host architecture Python development package. This dependency however will cause both components to be installed for the host architecture and for the Python interpreter this tends to fail postinst. Instead, it should be Build-Depends: &:native, lib& (where "&" is the package name previously used). The :native qualifier will cause the interpretr to be installed for the build architecture and the second dependency will pull the host architecture development package. For native builds, there is no difference as the first package depends on the second. This transformation is quite mechanical, affects many packages and helps cross building a lot. I suppose that this could be automated by the janitor. Thanks for considering Helmut
