Bug#887664: openal-soft: FTBFS: nothing is built

[Simon McVittie]

Control: retitle -1 openal-soft: FTBFS with dpkg-buildpackage --build=any,all

On Thu, 18 Jan 2018 at 22:28:15 +0100, Guus Sliepen wrote:
> Source: openal-soft
> Version: 1:1.18.2-1
> Severity: serious
> Justification: Policy 4.9
> 
> Building openal-soft from source in a pbuilder environment fails.

It looks like it succeeds if you build Architecture: all and
Architecture: any separately (which is what the buildds do, and what
anyone who is deliberately mimicking the buildds will do), because that
invokes "debian/rules build-arch" and "debian/rules build-indep"; but
fails if you build both in the same dpkg-buildpackage, because that
invokes "debian/rules build".

This is the first time I've seen a failure mode unique to building all
and any together - normally building all and any separately is the more
fragile mode, in my experience.

> It seems like it thinks there is nothing to build

This appears to be caused by the presence of a build/ directory (containing
an empty file named .empty) in the upstream tarball. Andres Mejia added
the solution that I was about to suggest,

    .PHONY: build

in debian/rules, in 2009; I wonder why that's no longer enough to make
it work?

Perhaps this

    .PHONY: build
    build: build-arch

or this

    .PHONY: build
    build:
            dh $@ --builddirectory=$(BUILD_TREE)

would work better?

    smcv