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

[Joe Nahmias]

Hi Roger,

On Tue, May 06, 2008 at 09:36:37PM +0100, Roger Leigh wrote:
> Joe Nahmias <jello at debian.org> writes:
[snip]
> I discussed this yesterday on #debian-devel.  The main issues are

Sorry I missed it, had I known I would've liked to participate.

> - 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.

OK.

> - 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.

Um, my reading of policy says that BINARY-arch is required and should
depend on the appropriate targets to build the package as necessary.
So, I don't see why dpkg-buildpackage can't simply run:

...
  debian/rules clean
  debian/rules binary-arch
...

All this would do is potentially expose bugs in packages that are not
currently policy-compliant in terms of the target dependancies, of which
I doubt there are very many due to dh_make templates and the like.

> - 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.

I understand for BUILD-arch; but BINARY-arch is required and has been as
far back as I can remember (corrections welcome).

> > 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.

Ah, it seems I'm barking up the wrong tree...
Well, I would certainly suggest that you fix this, but I guess it won't
do me all that much good :(

Thanks for the information though and if I can help in any way, please
feel free to ask.
--Joe