Subject: Re: lintian: Non-dh debhelper targets?

From: Guillem Jover <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 29 Dec 2019 21:55:03 +0100

Hi!

On Fri, 2019-12-06 at 16:15:12 -0800, Felix Lechner wrote:
> > Once build-arch and build-indep are supported by dpkg-buildpackage,
> > hopefully in the next week, and/or are required by Policy, please
> > could you apply the attached patch to move build-arch and build-indep
> > from recommended to required?
> 
> With many people now using dh over the older explicit targets [1], is
> this patch still needed?

> [1] According to trends.debian.net, only about 6% of packages use
> debhelper currently.

We discussed this over IRC some weeks ago. I checked the current
numbers derived from the debian-rules-missing-recommended-target tag
and how these get mapped to the different problem types, and here's
the number of sources of what I came up with (which I think is correct
but didn't record a reproducer :/):

  0   building arch-indep + arch-dep binaries (the non-trivial case)
  340 building only arch-dep binaries
  249 building only arch-indep binaries

So we are actually in a way better position than we were some years
ago. As I mentioned there, I don't think those numbers are at a point
where dpkg-source can stop using its fallback code to avoid a FTBFS.
But I guess lintian could make it a non-fatal error already, because
these have been policy violation for a while.

Felix then came up with the great idea of involving Jelmer Vernooĳ with
Debian Janitor, who was happy to take this on during the coming weeks,
and implemented already initial support for the automatic fix.

Thanks,
Guillem