Comment 1 for bug 2004011

Thanks for reporting this bug and trying to make it better.

When we are talking about the Debian Policy we need to keep in mind that it is versioned. You linked a section of the Debian Policy version 4.6.2.0, so packages complaint with that version should do what is written there (to make sure which version of Debian Policy a package is complaint you need to check the Standards-Version field in debian/control). Moreover, the very first sentence of the section is:

"Supporting the standardized environment variable DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS is recommended."

So those options are recommended, they are not mandatory. It is not an issue if you find a package that does not support those options.

src:heimdal in xenial (16.04) is compliant with Debian Policy 3.9.6, in this version we already have the nocheck option added (actually in version 3.8.1):

https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/upgrading-checklist.html#version-3-8-1

But again, this is recommended, not mandatory. Due to that, we will not update a package in ESM just to introduce support to nocheck.