[Buildd-tools-devel] Bug#403246: should this bug be reassigned to the policy?

[Robert Millan]

On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 11:06:08PM +0100, Piotr Ożarowski wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I was told to reassign this bug to policy asking to forbid alternate
> build dependencies.

Who told you?  I don't see it in this bug log.

Also, please note that "forbid" them isn't really accurate.  It gives the
impression these aren't currently taken into account by policy, but in fact
policy explicitly says this can be done in section 7.1 (second paragraph).

> Although I agree that alt. b. dep. are evil most of
> the times, I still think they're quite useful in few cases (see #471617)

The problem is in fact quite common when you try to recompile a package from
testing on stable.  Our syntax is smart enough to specify different situations
in which a package is considered "buildable", and so is the parser in dpkg-dev,
so it would sound like this shouldn't be a problem when producing backports,

But, alas, not quite:

  http://lists.backports.org/lurker-bpo/message/20080421.205337.663c04a8.en.html

> so I will not do this. Please feel free to reassign it there and I will
> forget about (mentioned in #471617) Debian Python policy's spirit and
> update all my packages that suffer from this bug.

Policy makes it clear that this syntax is allowed, other utilities (e.g.
dpkg-checkbuilddeps) comply with Policy but sbuild doesn't.  It sounds
clearly like a bug in sbuild to me.

> If you think this bug should be fixed anyway (I don't see "wontfix" tag),
> please tell me, I will learn perl and fix it for you.

I'd appreciate if you did.  I've been wanting to fix this for a long time,
but never got around to it (I don't know perl either).

Thank you

-- 
Robert Millan

<GPLv2> I know my rights; I want my phone call!
<DRM> What good is a phone call… if you are unable to speak?
(as seen on /.)