Bug#787093: autopkgtest: dpkg-deb chokes with build profiles in Build-Depends:

[Antonio Terceiro]

On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 01:08:06PM +0200, Johannes Schauer wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Quoting Antonio Terceiro (2015-05-29 12:42:44)
> > On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 02:52:10AM +0200, Guillem Jover wrote:
> > > If this is indeed parsing Build-Depends, you probably also want “build_dep
> > > => 1” there.
> > In a part of the time, that code will be parsing Build-Depends that will be
> > turned into Depends: of a fake package that is installed to pull in test
> > dependencies. In that case, besides build_dep, is that anything else we need
> > to pass to be sure that the end result is compatible with Depends: ?
> 
> you can see how sbuild does it which also parses Build-Depends to then create a
> dummy binary package to install later from them:
> 
> http://sources.debian.net/src/sbuild/0.65.2-1/lib/Sbuild/ResolverBase.pm/#L827
> 
> Turning build-depends into a binary package seem to be a common pattern not
> only shared by autopkgtest and sbuild but is also used by pbuilder or
> mk-build-deps. It would be great if there was a common library doing this but
> maybe the slightly different requirements of each software taking this approach
> as well as the different programming languages used make this tricky.

As far as different programming languages go, I think this could
probably be a small binary provided by apt that everyone could call
('take this Depends:/Build-Depends: line, and make sure those packages
are all installed'). Does not seem a lot different from `apt-get
build-dep foo.dsc`.

> On the other hand, I think all this software mainly does it that way because
> apt in unstable cannot yet be given a .dsc or unpacked debian/control and then
> satisfy the build dependencies from it. So everybody using apt to satisfy build
> dependencies of a local package first creates a dummy package from these build
> dependencies and only then passes it to apt.  Maybe all the software using this
> approach can drop it once apt from experimental moves to unstable because that
> one can do `apt-get build-dep foo.dsc`.

That would not work for autopkgtest because build depends is actually
not the common case, the normal case is installing packages that  are
needed for running the tests (usually "all the binary packages for this
source"), so we would need to create a fake .dsc to make use of that
feature anyway.

-- 
Antonio Terceiro <terceiro at debian.org>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 819 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/autopkgtest-devel/attachments/20150530/b05fb8f8/attachment.sig>