Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> wrote: > Andreas Barth wrote: >> * Hamish Moffatt ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) [050114 00:45]: >>>Not if build-essential included a suitable versioned depends, like >>>debhelper (>= 4). It already does that for gcc. >> That would still mean a versioned dependency on build-essential. > [...] > A dependency >= an old version is > similarly redundant
That's correct from the point of view of a buildd, or of a developer running a sid machine. But it is not correct for backporters: Imagine that packages are added to build-essential, or versioned dependencies in it are bumped to a higher version number. Then a package without Build-Dependencies, or with Build-Dependencies that can be fulfilled in stable, might still not build in a stable environment. The solution, of course, is to first backport build-essential. For the sake of users making their own backports, we should document this. And we should try hard to make sure that all packages in build essential can be backported without problems. I hope that debhelper won't ever need a versionened dependency on perl; this would make life really hard for backporters, with or without being it build-essential. Regards, Frank -- Frank Küster Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich Debian Developer
