[Pkg-rust-maintainers] Computing Build-Depends at build time (and other updates to debian/control)?

[Guillem Jover]

Hi!

On Sun, 2016-08-21 at 02:03:00 -0700, Josh Triplett wrote:
> Some packages could potentially compute most of their Build-Depends the
> same way.  For example, I'm working on a tool ("debcargo") to package
> Rust libraries and applications, which include detailed metadata (via
> Cargo) for dependencies on other Rust libraries.  Given a minimal set of
> tools installed (cargo and that packaging tool), I could compute all the
> necessary Depends and Build-Depends on Rust packages, including
> versions.
> 
> Right now, that packaging tool has to compute the Build-Depends at
> packaging time and embed them in debian/control.  (Most likely, I'll
> include comments delimiting the Cargo dependencies, to make it easier to
> update them.)
> 
> What would it take to compute Build-Depends at build time instead, with
> a minimal set of Build-Depends installed to support doing so?

Please see #5210 and #677474 (and all their merged bugs), plus the
probably numerous previous discussions in debian-devel.

Thanks,
Guillem