On Sat, Oct 18, 2003 at 04:37:45PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> > 88029
>
> yeah well. That is not all the dfiscussion there was on it. In
> March 2001, we had more than those comments on it:
Nah, I saw that one as well, and I'm fairly sure I answered it back then.
If not, please let me know and I'll repeat it.
> I still think that what we have now is a long established
> interface to the build system; saying that the ./debian/rules file is
> a Makefile is a short hand for describing an extended version of the
> interface defined
It's possible to interpret it that way now. But it's a historic injustice,
it was "rules file is an executable makefile" originally, which can very
well mean that the point being made is that dpkg-buildpackage will be
calling debian/rules without an explicit interpreter specified. Which is
what it does today as well.
> Pretending that this is not an interface that we have now
> depended upon for years is hiding from the facts
Actually, nobody is doing that. The fact is that whenever we extended
dpkg-buildpackage and afterwards the policy manual, it was the interface
that was amended in simple terms, there was never "we'll now use
this-and-that function of Make" (so far I remember only two of those, when
the DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS env. variable was added and when testing for existence
of build-arch was added).
So in effect, we have been doing the right thing all along, but the mistake
that the conversion to must-should-may verbiage caused, was never corrected.
And now you can use that as a precedent against my argument.
If I was a cynic, I'd call your argument self-perpetuating :)
--
2. That which causes joy or happiness.
