Hideki Yamane: > Hi, > > On Thu, 03 Jan 2019 11:11:00 +0000 > Niels Thykier <ni...@thykier.net> wrote: >> * Migrating to "Rules-Requires-Root: no" where possible. > > Is there any plan to set "Rules-Requires-Root: no" for default? > It seems that most of the packages doesn't require root privilege > to be built, so "default no" is better to reduce work, IMHO. > >
Hi, I would love to make "Rules-Requires-Root: no" the default and I agree with you that it is a better default, but I have no plans to drag/spearhead this effort. We are very far from being able to flip the default. There are some 800+ packages that need to be updated to follow latest policy requirements plus explicitly declare their need for (fake)root. Known blockers include: * https://lintian.debian.org/tags/debian-rules-missing-recommended-target.html * https://lintian.debian.org/tags/should-specify-rules-requires-root.html ... and my understanding is that it will require NMU'ing a large amount of these 800 packages of the lot to get there (the build-arch|build-indep transition has been going on for years and will probably take 5-8 more years to completely finish if left on its own). I ran out of gas on finishing build-arch+build-indep, so I am not really feeling up for dragging that to the goal line. I have been doing an NMU here and there plus added MR requests on salsa for setting "R³: binary-targets" to fix a few up them but this the level I can motivate myself to do. In case, you are wondering why build-arch/build-indep is related to this problem: One of the reasons why Rules-Requires-Root can reduce the number of debian/rules runs is because we 1) disable dpkg's probing for build-arch and 2) we just call the binary target directly and let the debian/rules file handle that gracefully. Maybe older packages do not do this and just fail to build properly (despite the policy requirement that mandates otherwise) - among other dh before compat 9 (or 10?) does not handle dependencies between rules targets correctly either. In summary: I do not think we can flip the default before those two lintian tags are close to zero and I am not up for that challenge (but I hope someone is). Thanks, ~Niels
