[Aptitude-devel] Bug#966640: Processed: Re: Bug#966640: build-depends: debhelper-compat (= 13) cannot be satisfied

[Axel Beckert]

Control: severity -1 important

Hii Sam,

Sam Hartman wrote:
> Axel> Yeah, this is a long-standing and known issue in aptitude.
> 
> I'd ask the aptitude developers to consider whether this issue should be
> reprioritized as important rather than normal.

Good point, thanks! Done herewith. (And Cc'ed to the master bug report
on this.)

> Last year, we decided that the recommended way to build most
> packages is to use debhelper. The recommended way to describe a
> debhelper compatibility level is a dependency of the form
> 
> debhelper-compat (= 13)

Totally valid point.

> So, aptitude build-dep is not able to process build dependencies on
> the recommended way of describing Debian source packages.
>
> As more and more packages adopt this recommended approach aptitude
> build-dep is going to become more and more useless. 

Ack.

> Even if you are not able to fix the problem promptly, would it be
> possible to detect detect that this situation is happening in the
> build-dep path and recommend  using a different resolver?

Another potential not full-blown, but more suitable solution would be
let libapt's resolver translate and maybe even resolve the build-deps
into non-virtual packages and then continue with them as if they would
be the build-depedencies.

Only drawback I see so far: No possibility to interactively choose an
alternative resolution for virtual packages, if there's one.

Manuel: What do you think of this variant?

		Regards, Axel
-- 
 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert <abe at debian.org>, https://people.debian.org/~abe/
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