On Mon, Dec 15, 2025 at 05:15:46PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote: > On Wed, Dec 10, 2025 at 07:11:30PM +0100, Santiago Vila wrote: > > Hi. My script "check-nocheck" tells me that the attached patch would > > be enough to fix the bug. But maybe there is a better fix, so I leave > > it to you. > > Hi, > > I've noticed that your script has made a few mistakes in this area in a way > that's probably easily fixable, so I thought I'd mention it. If you see > "pyproject_hooks._impl.BackendUnavailable: Cannot import > 'setuptools.build_meta'" in the build log, then with high probability the > correct fix is to make sure that python3-setuptools is in Build-Depends > without <!nocheck>. > > In this case, your fix only works by coincidence (because python3-ipykernel > transitively depends on python3-setuptools), and it might break again later.
Ok, this is indeed a very good point, and I'm glad that you noticed it before anybody applied the not-so-optimal patch, but the script is not AI-powered and does not try to find the best possible fix. The script just tries to build the package with all BD having <!nocheck> installed, then removes one package at a time until it fails to build again, at which point the last removed package is considered "actually required". Adding a new BD which was not explicitly listed in debian/control at all is completely outside of the scope of the script. For this reason I tried to be very careful with the wording when providing those patches: The attached patch would be enough to fix the bug. But maybe there is a better fix, so I leave it to you. (By "better fix" I refer precisely to the kind of better fix you discovered here, not to another fix in which we drop a few less <!nocheck> annotations). So, the script did not really make a mistake, it did what I asked it to do, which is to find the optimal solution among a reduced set of considered solutions (but not among all possible solutions, which would require a completely different script). If you think I should add some paragraph about all this in the wiki page about "nocheck", I will do. Thanks.
