[Debian GNUstep maintainers] Bug#823281: gnustep-make: build-indep depends on binary-arch

[Santiago Vila]

Package: src:gnustep-make
Version: 2.6.6-3
Severity: serious

Dear maintainer:

While investigating Bug #806197 I found the following policy
violations in debian/rules:


* The build target should depend on build-arch and build-indep.

Currently, it is like this:

# NOTE: The Build-Indep-Depends are only available, when building the
# build-indep packages.
build: build-arch # build-indep

Quoting policy speaking about build-arch and build-indep:

  The build target should either depend on those targets or take the
  same actions as invoking those targets would perform.

If I only install build-depends and not build-indep-depends, it follows
that I can only use the build-arch target, but that's *my* problem.

The build target should still build everything, for the case that I
install all the build-dependencies and want to build everything.


* The "build-indep" target depends indirectly on "binary-arch" (!).
This is what I see:

build-indep: debian/build-indep-stamp
clean_files += debian/build-indep-stamp
debian/build-indep-stamp: binary-arch


Well, binary-arch is where architecture-dependent .deb packages are
created (i.e. Arch: any). Quoting policy:

  The build-arch and build-indep targets must not do anything that
  might require root privilege.

Because actually creating .deb packages requires to be root (or fakeroot),
it follows that build-indep must *not* depend on any of the binary
targets.


This is probably the reason why "dpkg-buildpackage -A" fails (Bug #806197),
but I can't verify this easily because I don't have a fixed debian/rules.

Thanks.