On Fri, Feb 18, 2005 at 09:17:55PM +0000, Henning Makholm wrote: > Scripsit Joel Aelwyn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > The reason given in the origional thread was that these Depends are not > > solely for building Debian packages (when Build-Essential is reasonable to > > expect), but for "I need to compile $userspace package", which does *not* > > require B-E be installed, according to current policy. > > But can one get a C compiler at all (at least a Debian-supplied one) > without also pulling in an appropriate libc-dev? I would think > that "I need to compile $userspace package" *did* require at least a > compiler to be installed, regardless of policy. > > Libc6-dev does *recommend* c-compiler, but that does not help with > "I need to compile $userspace package" if $userspace package does not > happen to require any third-party libraries.
I guess that depends on whether one wants to rely on every package which Provides c-compiler to also Depend on the correct libc*-dev package for the relevant platform(s). If so, however, then it needs to become strictly not-OK to Depend on libc*-dev unless you're doing a versioned Dependancy, in which case you'll have to version every one of the various libc*-dev packages correctly (since you can't rely on the Provides libc6-dev of glibc packages to work in the presence of a versioned dependancy, and of course the non-glibc ports don't even consider adding that header, as it would be utterly bogus - they can't even pretend to be the same thing, only equivalent, which is libc-dev). Really, I think the simplest answer is a tool that detects *all* of the relevant -dev packages, in a simple and automated fashion, for the exact same reasons we don't expect people to try to hand-version and hand-impart every shared library dependancy their package has, but instead provide dpkg-shlibdeps and dh_shlibdeps. -- Joel Aelwyn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ,''`. : :' : `. `' `-
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