Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer <perezme...@gmail.com> writes: > So, what about if we could have [meta] packages that can be installed by > the user but not used as Build-Depends entries? Please note that for the > moment I'm targeting more at the idea itself rather than at the > implementation (but I'll certainly love to know if you have an idea on > how could this be implemented).
> At one point I thought of adding a Lintian test checking for this kind > of usage, but first and foremost I would like to know if you think this > is a viable/acceptable idea, maybe even adding a special section in our > policy. I could have sworn that we already had tags like that in Lintian. Certainly, this is a concept that has already existed in Debian for some time. There have always been metapackages or other similar cases that are only intended for end users and would make no sense as build dependencies, such as all of the task-* packages. Lintian feels like the right place to put a test like this. If there are dependencies like that which could potentially cause serious issues, those could even be an auto-reject tag. I'm not sure that Policy would have much to say about this unless we need some mechanism for labeling such packages other than a MR to Lintian. The important information is the list of packages that shouldn't be used this way, and the hard part is probably gathering that list. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
