Bug#971418: jhbuild: Missing dependency on python3-distuils

[Simon McVittie]

On Wed, 30 Sep 2020 at 10:40:53 +0100, Chris Lamb wrote:
> Patch attached (although it might mean some Python substvar apparatus
> is not working as expected).

I don't think it's expected to work automatically in this case: I think
hard-coding the dependency, as in your patch, is likely to be the only
solution.

The automation in dh-python can only work for packages that
use distutils/setuptools as a build system (with setup.py and
requirements.txt), because otherwise there's no good way to guess what
the dependencies might be. I don't think it's completely reliable even for
those packages, because dependency management in a dynamic language is not
straightforward, and packages often don't distinguish between development
and runtime dependencies, or between optional and mandatory dependencies.

jhbuild seems to be using Autotools, which doesn't have a standardized
way to declare Python runtime dependencies.

    smcv