Subject: Re: Proposed mass bug filing: packages without support for build-arch and build-indep

From: Simon McVittie <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 6 Nov 2021 11:40:29 +0000

On Sat, 06 Nov 2021 at 11:31:25 +0100, Emilio Pozuelo Monfort wrote:
> On 05/11/2021 21:22, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> > build-arch and build-indep are required targets according to Debian
> > Policy section 4.9.
...
> > Unfortunately this is only a warning in lintian, which might explain
> > why so many packages are still affected.
> 
> lintian should move those targets to the debian-rules-missing-required-target tag.

That request is #657390 (in cc).

When this was discussed some years ago, Niels Thykier pointed out that
debian-rules-missing-required-target is on the ftp team's list of Lintian
tags that cause automatic rejection[1], so making that change in Lintian
would make it impossible to do a sourceful upload of the affected packages
(for example to fix some unrelated RC issue) without also adding the
required targets.

This does not necessarily mean the Lintian change is a bad idea, it's just
something we should be aware of - expanding the scope of autorejections
should be intentional rather than accidental.

    smcv

[1] https://ftp-master.debian.org/static/lintian.tags