Bug#525935: [buildd-tools-devel] Bug#403246: Still occurs

[Roger Leigh]

On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 02:03:10PM +0200, Sylvestre Ledru wrote:

> Just a quick update to confirm that this bug still exists. See: #525935

Thanks.  We still haven't yet had any proposed patches to the
dependency resolver to correctly support alternative build dependencies.
Currently support is extremely poor.  This is partly because the
whole idea of alternative build-deps would result in non-deterministic
builds.

In the case of #525935 the fact that the first build-dep is nonexistent
will cause problems, and is in itself wrong.  You should ensure that
the first build-dep is valid.

This should be fixed, but unless someone actually works on it and
submits patches, it's not a top priority to fix, partly due to the
complexity.  We are considering implementing alternative dependency
resolvers in order to fix the problem, including using a mechanism
of a "dependency package" like pbuilder uses so that we use the
apt-get or aptitude dependency resolver directly rather than
implementing our own.

The dependency package is very easy to generate; just a few lines of
code.  However, I don't yet know of an easy method of robustly
triggering package installation and removal or of reversing the
process.  One can use dpkg --(get|set)-selections to save/restore
the packages, but I'm not sure how to synch the real package status
to this state reliably (reinstalling missing packages and purging
installed build-deps).


Regards,
Roger

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