Ferenc Wágner:
> On Sun, 09 Oct 2016 08:06:00 +0000 Niels Thykier <ni...@thykier.net> wrote:
>
>> I will have a look at fixing the debhelper side of this, so it becomes
>> less magic. As it is, I cannot quite grok the proposed solution in
>> dh-exec - which I am pretty sure is no fault of dh-exec itself, but
>> rather an artefact of the entire --fail-missing interface.
>
> Hi Niels,
>
> Could you please update this bug with the current best practices or
> plans in light of dh_missing or other advances?
>
What I can say is that dh_missing exists and is ready to be tested.
Whether it can be used to fix the dh-exec interaction is not entirely
clear to me, but perhaps we can figure that out in this bug now.
The new interface is that:
* dh_install records what it installs where for all packages (even
packages not acted on to support -a/-i builds)
* dh_missing checks the logs from dh_install (among other) and compares
it with what is present in d/tmp (--sourcedir).
- dh_missing also responds to d/not-installed and --exclude, which
can also be used to control what is important to install and what
is not.
* If all files in d/tmp are recorded (or excluded), everything is
presumed to be fine.
* Caveat: Files can be processed twice! For packages that do a
separate -i and -a run under a regular build, the config files will
be processed twice as dh_install cannot know that the other call will
happen.
In summary:
* If dh-exec ensures that all files are properly recorded (even for
packages that are not acted on) then we are good.
- this applies to more helpers now as e.g. dh_installman also records
what files are installed.
* For packages not acted on, dh_install (et al) will just record the
file as being installed, but won't actually do anything.
- For renames, this means that dh-exec can probably just list the
original source file without doing the rename in the "no-act"
case.
Future work/known issues:
* For things that do multiple builds, dh_missing has some problems.
These are reportedly solvable with the buildlabels prototype in
experimental.
Thanks,
~Niels
