On Tue, 22, Mar, 2011 at 01:57:42PM +0000, Hector Oron spoke thus..
Hi Mark,
2011/3/22 Mark Hymers mhy@debian.org:
The current design is the Binary packages can contain an additional control field: Built-Using.
First of all, thanks very much for taking care of it, that probably will get us going.
I just would like to point out that current design solves half of the problem (being GPL compliant), but it does not solve code duplication in the archive, which it can also be useful for large datasets. IMHO, we do not want source and binary packages containing the same bits, bytes and nibbles, problem which might be solved by the multiarch specification, treating 'source' as yet another architecture (in next couple years?) :-)
I'd have thought the right answer to that was to allow some form of Build-Depends-Source mechanism where the source is unpacked at build time in a known place or something. Of course, the problem with this is that we traditionally haven't allowed network access to be required during a build so the exact semantics would have to be worked out. Maybe something like, if a package declares Build-Depends-Source: gcc-4.5 the source code must be available under debian/external-source/gcc-4.5 and then leave it up to the builder to sort that out. That's a rough (and probably bad) idea off the top of my head - I'm sure the buildd team at least will have other thoughts on the matter.
Mark