[Pbuilder-maint] Bug#337015: Does not correctly fetch experimental depends

[Mike Hommey]

On Sun, Oct 22, 2006 at 02:27:13PM +0200, Loïc Minier <lool at dooz.org> wrote:
> severity 337015 normal
> tags 337015 + patch
> merge 337015 #390888
> retitle 337015 Support for pulling stuff from experimental
> stop
> 
>         Hi folks,
> 
>  I just saw you already discussed supporting experimental in pbuilder; I
>  implemented some form of support in #390888.  In short, it tries to
>  force the version of the build-dep for all available APT versions if
>  the default does not satisfy the build-deps.
> 
>  You might want to test the patch; I'm using it successfully since some
>  weeks now.  It has a limitation in that it can't deal with Conflicts
>  easily, you might need to tweak your build-depends in this particular
>  case.  Ideally, a full blown support would use some "problem solver",
>  such as aptitude's, and not shell logic based on apt commands.
> 
>  Sorry for the separate report and hence the noise.
> 
>  It might be worth it to still distribute the shell snippet which was
>  proposed in #337015 to manually install the build-deps as a workaround
>  for particular cases.

I got a stupid idea that may help solve this problem in a much simpler
way: Create a fake dummy package containing the strict minimum to get apt
do its job with the package dependencies.

All that is needed, AFAIK, would be to create a DEBIAN/control file
containing the following:

--8<------------------------>8--
Package: package-name-build-depends
Version: package-version
Architecture: target-arch
Maintainer: package maintainer
Depends: All build-depends and build-indeps (depending on --binary-arch
or --binary-all passed to satisfydepends, and filtered for target-arch)
Conflicts: All build-conflicts and build-conflicts-indep (conditions
same as above)
Description: Build dependencies for the package-name source package
--8<------------------------>8--

Then generate the pacakge with dpkg-deb -b, generate a local repository
containing it with apt-ftparchive or similar tool, and install it with
aptitude install package-name-build-depends.

All appropriate build dependencies would get installed, if they can be
resolved.

Well, it would be even simpler if it were possible to give the list of
build-deps and build-conflicts to aptitude directly...

Mike