[buildd-tools-devel] Should sbuild build_arch_all=1 by default?

[Dima Kogan]

Hi. Apologies if this has been discussed earlier; I didn't find a
discussion.

I just killed over an hour trying to figure out why one of my builds was
mysteriously omitting some packages. Turns out sbuild doesn't build
sources by default and doesn't build arch-all packages by default. This
is documented, and I'm certain everybody on this list knows it; my bad.

Should this be so? This is a trap for the unwary and I'm certain many
man-hours have been wasted by these defaults. The other Debian build
tools make the opposite choice: dpkg-buildpackage, debuild and so on
build sources and arch-all packages unless told not to. So an
unsuspecting user (such as a 2-hours-younger me) simply swaps a
dpkg-buildpackage call for an sbuild call and then wonders why things
are failing in a non-obvious way.

At the very least, can sbuild say very clearly in its output that it's
not building these things? Stating exactly how it's invoking
dpkg-buildpackage would probably reduce head-scratching time. Although
flipping the defaults of -s and -A would be even better. Would this
break lots of existing deployments?

(grumpy) dima