Bug#396459: libsdl1.2-dev: Dropping *-dev dependencies breaks package builds too close to release

[Daniel Schepler]

On Wednesday 01 November 2006 00:17 am, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 31, 2006 at 10:12:17PM +0100, Daniel Schepler wrote:
> > After the recent upload of libsdl1.2-dev downgrading the *-dev
> > dependencies to recommends, lots of packages (for example mednafen,
> > missing a libgl-dev dependency) have started failing to build from source
> > because they don't properly declare those dependencies themselves
> > introduced by their own source.  While this is unquestionably a bug in
> > the other packages, the change breaks too many packages close to release
> > time, so in my opinion the new version of libsdl1.2-dev should not make
> > it into etch.
>
> As this is a case of exposing RC bugs in those packages, not causing them,
> I'm inclined to disagree.  Do you have a sense of how many packages are
> actually affected by this change?  I would hope that in this day and age,
> the final count of affected packages would be relatively small.
>
> It's known that some other lib packages depending on libsdl1.2-dev need to
> be rebuilt in order for the .la change to propagate upwards, but that
> should be a trivial case of binNMUing.

So far, out of about 50 packages I've tried rebuilding with libsdl* and sdl* 
rebuilt, I've found 8 failures.  Assuming the proportion continues for the 
rest, with approximately 200 SDL-using packages that I counted, that makes 
about 30 new RC bugs.

Some of the most common failures:

* [2] SDL_syswm.h needs the X headers.  I'm not sure whether this should be 
fixed in libsdl1.2-dev or not; if it is, that could take care of about 1/3 to 
1/2 of the failures.
* [4] Packages using GL without proper Build-Depends.

As a side note: audacious failed because pbuilder doesn't 
understand "libasound2-dev [linux-any]".  Do the buildd's understand it?
-- 
Daniel Schepler