On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 06:43:03PM +0100, Andreas Enge wrote:
     On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 06:13:09PM +0100, John Darrington wrote:
     > You are probably right - to be sure they should be manually checked.  An 
     > alternative would be to attempt cross building all the affected packages. 
     
     In the case that native inputs should instead be normal, if I understand
     correctly, cross-builds will succeed, but the built package will not be
     usable on the target system.
     
     Your suggestion detects cases where normal inputs should be native.

It should also do the inverse.  If, say, libpng is declared as native-input, when it
should be input, then it will fail at build stage.  Specifically at the linking stage when
the liker tries to link the target binary against the native -lpng.

However in the case of things like perl, I suppose this relates to what I was saying earlier 
about putting the onus on the user to install it rather than making it an input.

     
     > In the case of perl, python, etc I recall that previous discussions 
     > concluded that if they are needed in installed scripts, then it should be up to the 
     > user to install them.
     
     No, as I understand it, the patch-shebang is there so that scripts run
     without installing additional interpreters.

I certainly remember in the case of octave we decided not to patch-shebang and have the user 
install the additional interpreters, but this may not be a universal policy.  I think it depends
on if the additional interpreters are there as part of the core functionality or as an 
optional feature.
     
J'

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