On Fri, Jan 06, 2023 at 06:54:43PM +0100, Helmut Grohne wrote: > 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.
>From the Janitor's point of view, it would be easiest if these were included in the multi-arch hint output (perhaps as a new type of hint) - since then it would just be another case to handle in apply-multiarch-hints. Cheers, Jelmer
