On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 10:19:43AM +0100, Kay Hayen wrote: > > >>As to deterministic, are you implying that the choice is not made in > >>a deterministic way? It probably is just that somebody or something > >>hates it when not all choices are valid. > > > >If you use alternative build-deps, two builds of the same package at > >the same time might produce different binary packages (and it could > >happen that the i386 and amd64 packages are built against different > >dependencies, for example). That is not something desirable. > > As you can imagine, I would prefer to use optional build-deps and > use the alternative one only as a stop-gap. > > The selected version of base-files is carefully selected to achieve > the desired effect, i.e. no Debian this package builds on has both, > so there cannot be indeterminism at all.
Just as a general comment on the issue, when you upload to Debian with dist=unstable in debian/changelog, those build-dependencies in debian/control are /for/ unstable. Not stable, or oldstable or anything else. The primary purpose for your package is for building on unstable. If the package supports other distribution versions with no changes, that's all good. But if it requires messy alternatives, then please do consider doing this via backports or making a separate version for the older, incompatible, distribution. You can then keep such differences on different VCS branches, for example see http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=buildd-tools/schroot.git;a=summary where you can see we maintain -$dist-backport branches for backporting the current stable release, and -$dist branches for stable-updates e.g. security. There's really no good reason for having one version do everything, and in fact it's probably also bad because when the user comes to upgrade, the different distributions have the same version for totally different package builds, and so it might not get upgraded. Regards, Roger -- .''`. Roger Leigh : :' : Debian GNU/Linux http://people.debian.org/~rleigh/ `. `' schroot and sbuild http://alioth.debian.org/projects/buildd-tools `- GPG Public Key F33D 281D 470A B443 6756 147C 07B3 C8BC 4083 E800 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-rc-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
