[Debian-bootstrap] could Build-Depends-Indep be discarded?

[P. J. McDermott]

On 2012-07-21 18:42, Johannes Schauer wrote:
> If the Build-Depends-Indep and Build-Conflicts-Indep fields are
> disregarded, then the main scc shrinks from 1027 vertices to 979
> vertices. The amount of cycles up to length four reduce from 276 to 206.
> 
> Especially the cycles containing gtk-doc-tools, doxygen, debiandoc-sgml
> and texlive-latex-base got much less.

Great!

> Looking at the cycles that still contain those packages could give hints
> as to which packages to also add Build-Depends-Indep fields to.
> 
> This is, if we want to use the Build-Depends-Indep field for the purpose
> of breaking dependency cycles.
> 
> Do we?

It seems like the answer is "yes":

> <pehjota> Did you see josch's last mail to the list?  Is there any
>           problem with using Build-Depends-Indep to break cycles?
> <wookey_> hmm, no I seem to be about 5 mails behind...
> <wookey_> no Build-Depends-Indep is the future
> <wookey_> It's just been a bit of a lame duck for years as it was in
>           the spec but no build tools actually took any nocie until
>           very recently
> <wookey_> But as you observe it works fine in current sbuild and I
>           understnad it's actually being used in buildds now (I
>           certainly got an FTBFS on one of my packages because it
>           wasn;t quite right)
> <wookey_> Maintainers will thank you for sending them correct
>           build-depends-indep patches
> <wookey_> (you need to test carefully though, on bare build-essential
>           chroots - I managed to find my package built OK locally with
>           sbuild and pbuilder but broke on the buildds)

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