Bug#870095: liblwp-protocol-https-perl: Make source package bootstrappable

[Niko Tyni]

On Sat, Jul 29, 2017 at 11:19:42AM -0700, Daniel Schepler wrote:
> Source: liblwp-protocol-https-perl
> Version: 6.07-1
> Severity: wishlist
> 
> Currently, liblwp-protocol-https-perl Build-Depends on libwww-perl
> which in turn Depends on liblwp-protocol-https-perl.  It would be nice
> if this build dependency cycle could be broken to aid the goal of a
> bootstrappable Debian.

Thanks for reporting this issue! I agree this would be nice.
 
> As far as I can tell, if you don't run the testsuite then libwww-perl
> isn't required, so the package could update the Build-Depends-Indep to
> something like:
> 
> Build-Depends-Indep: perl, libio-socket-ssl-perl <!nocheck>,
> libnet-http-perl <!nocheck>, libwww-perl (>= 6.05-2) <!nocheck>,
> libtest-requiresinternet-perl <!nocheck>
> 
> which would take care of the cycle.

This feels right to me fwiw and should work fine.

As an aside I'm wondering if we (pkg-perl) should start tagging build
dependencies with <!nocheck> as a matter of course. While making the
metadata richer this way would certainly be an improvement in the quality
of the packaging, the utility does seem somewhat limited.  For arch:any
packages it would aid at least cross building, but for arch:all the
only thing I can think of is breaking (rare) build dependency loops like
this one.

In general, I expect that the vast majority of pkg-perl packages are
similar to this one in that they only need debhelper, perl and maybe
libmodule-build-perl to actually build, with the rest of the build
dependencies being only needed for the test suite.

I think I'll bring this up on the debian-perl list when I find some time,
just wanted to chime in here. I'll upload the fix soonish unless someone
beats me to it.

Cheers,
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org