[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#873596: avahi FTCBFS: uninstallable python Build-Depends, fails to figure out what distribution Debian is

[Helmut Grohne]

Hi Michael,

On Sun, Sep 17, 2017 at 07:18:08PM +0200, Michael Biebl wrote:
> Given that python-all-dev already depends on libpython-all-dev,
> shouldn't python-all-dev ensure to pull in the correct version?

Yes, python-all-dev depends on libpython-all-dev, but we want the build
architecture python-all-dev and the host architecture libpython-all-dev.
Thus the dependency doesn't get us the correct version. Note the ":any".

Yes, this is weired. No, I don't understand why we didn't make
dependencies on python-all-dev just work (by swapping python-all-dev and
libpython-all-dev and reversing the dependency).

> Hm, that would make the package not syncable to Ubuntu and other
> derivatives.
> I wonder if it would be better to conditionalize on dpkg-vendor
> (DEB_VENDOR, /usr/share/dpkg/vendor.mk) instead.

Ubuntu is not a valid value for --with-distro. I guess it treats Ubuntu
as Debian. Furthermore, the flag is only passed for cross compilation
and thus doesn't affect native compilation. So I think we should first
make this work for Debian (while not breaking native Ubuntu builds) and
then Ubuntu can provide the dpkg-vendor code if necessary.

Helmut