When I was installing kde-builder on Debian Sid, I got a warning about non-existent packages (qt6-wayland-dev-tools, libpcre3-dev) when I ran kde-builder --install-distro-packages. Should I report this somewhere?
These packages are named in a file in repo-metadata, but repo-metadata doesn’t have a category in the bugtracker.
That’s odd though, I see those packages available specifically in Sid according to
The answer lies in your question itself: Debian Sid.
Debian is known for its “unusual” and confusing package management methodology; the problem likely stems from the way they distribute kde-builder.
In any case, when there is an issue with unmet dependencies, you should always report the bug to the distribution.
They aren’t really in Sid; they are available only in some unofficial ports, namely ia64, loong64, m68k, riscv64. It is likely that these ports are semi-active, so they haven’t removed the packages yet.
I don’t want to report this to Debian, because the packages were removed deliberately.
For libpcre3-dev, see https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1094807.
qt6-wayland-dev-tools is still present in stable; it only contains /usr/lib/qt6/libexec/qtwaylandscanner (and a changelog and a copyright file). Unstable appears to have moved qtwaylandscanner under qt6-base-dev-tools. qt6-wayland-dev-tools was removed as “empty”.
the problem likely stems from the way they distribute kde-builder
I didn’t install it from Debian; I installed it from KDE, using https://invent.kde.org/sdk/kde-builder/-/raw/master/scripts/initial_setup.sh, as described at https://develop.kde.org/docs/getting-started/building/kde-builder-setup/. Debian doesn’t distribute kde-builder.
In that case you can just send an MR directly to repo-metadata to fix that.
About pcre3 I don’t know. Some brief searching seems to imply it’s a dep that was used only for KJS, which was deprecated. If it is indeed not used by anything else when running kde-builder workspace, it can just be removed.
Okay, I can create a MR regarding qtwaylandscanner. However, since Debian Stable and several versions of Ubuntu still include it in qt6-wayland-dev-tools, shouldn’t that package be retained?
That’s just a list of development packages to install preemptively. Debian Stable isn’t as well supported as Debian Testing/Unstable (this is explicitly told in the docs), so it should be fine for users on Debian Stable to install the necessary package themselves.