[Buildd-tools-devel] Bug#478524: Bug#478524: Bug#474413: Problem with autobuild of libtommath/0.39-2

[Roger Leigh]

Joe Nahmias <jello at debian.org> writes:

> On Mon, May 05, 2008 at 11:57:55PM +0300, Riku Voipio wrote:
>> Lets not complicate this matter with the age-long build/build-arch
>> discussion. libtommath needs add the build-dependencies enough to
>> to get through debian/rules build for the time being.
>
> Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't understand why the build target
> is called in the first place.  Can't you just run "debian/rules
> binary-arch" -- which is mandated by policy -- and everything will be ok
> because of the target dependancies in debian/rules.  Why use build at
> all -- especially since dpkg-buildpackage can't determine the "right"
> thing with build/build-arch?!?

I discussed this yesterday on #debian-devel.  The main issues are

- it's not possible to robustly determine if debian/rules contains a
  build-arch or build-indep target due to things like pattern rules.
  There are some hacky ways to do this, but these would not be
  reliable.  Ideally, make needs to provide a means of querying if a
  target is present.
- most packages do not yet contain a build-arch|build-indep target,
  and policy currently makes this optional.  Calling "debian/rules
  binary-arch" will break a lot of packages.
- moving to requiring these targets is something that would need to be
  done after the release of Lenny, as a release goal for Lenny+1.

> And I would further argue that it's a bug for sbuild to use
> dpkg-buildpackage (as it's currently implemented, using the build
> target) without installing B-D-I.  IOW, sbuild should fix this by
> installing B-D-I to work around the dpkg-buildpackage issue, or use some
> other method (run "debian/rules clean; debian/rules binary-arch"
> manually) to build the arch-only portions of packages.  Then, when the
> issue with build/build-arch is finally resolved, only sbuild has to be
> changed -- rather than make every packager fix this for each and every
> package.

I could fix this in sbuild, but unfortunately the packaged sbuild
(which we maintain) is not the same as that used by the actual Debian
autobuilders (which has a separate maintainer), and so this would not
really help.  Hopefully at some point the autobuilders can switch to
the buildd-tools code, but the buildd/wanna-build part isn't ready for
that yet.  It will hopefully be ready after Lenny, but I can't promise
anything.


Regards,
Roger

-- 
  .''`.  Roger Leigh
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