[buildd-tools-devel] Bug#800748: sbuild: "sbuild -s" (maybe) is overly picky about building arch:all packages without making binary-indep

[Dima Kogan]

Package: sbuild
Version: 0.65.2-1
Severity: normal

Hi. This probably isn't a "bug", but it's an unexpected behavior.
Suppose you have a simple debianization that uses the basic debhelper
debian/rules:

    #!/usr/bin/make -f
    %:
            dh $@

and has both an arch:all and arch:any packages defined. You can build
these just fine with dpkg-buildpackage, but if you issue 'sbuild -s' it
barfs with

    Package builds hello-doc_3-1_all.deb when binary-indep target is not
    called. This is a bug in the packaging.

You need to build with 'sbuild -s -A' to explicitly ask for the arch-all
package. Sbuild is technically right: we built the arch-all package
without the build explicitly asking for it, but that's what debhelper
does, and maybe sbuild should just accept these build results. I'm not
totally sure what the right answer here is, so maybe it's good as is. I
however had to spend time figuring out why 'sbuild -s' was barfing, and
I'd rather have used that time for something else.