[Pkg-javascript-devel] Bug#725363: Bug#725363: Bug#725363: present but uninstallable on architectures lacking nodejs

[Jérémy Lal]

On 06/10/2013 11:28, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 05, 2013 at 02:53:33PM +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
>> Feels to me that it would be better to fix this at its core instead of 
>> covering over it by use of bogus build-dependency.  I am sure you've 
>> already considered that option, and would appreciate your elaborating 
>> more (I saw and tried to follow your conversation on irc, but failed to 
>> understand it there).
> 
> I don't think artificial build-dependencies are a particularly
> inappropriate fix.
> 
> Any change to britney to try to have it promote only architectures that
> worked would amount to accepting permanent technical debt in unstable,
> which I think is very poor design.  Package maintainers should generally
> be trying to avoid dependency breakage in unstable where they can as
> well as in testing (or, to put it another way, accepting permanent
> dependency breakage in unstable makes it harder to see the wood for the
> trees), and by far the simplest way to do this is to fix the packages
> rather than blaming the infrastructure for pointing out a real problem.

(I have nothing to say about the general case)
for the particular case of node-* packages, it is true that
when test suites are or will be run, they will have to build-depend
on nodejs. So adding a build-dependency on nodejs for each arch:all
module doesn't seem so bad to me today.

Jérémy.