On Sat, Oct 18, 2003 at 04:39:54PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > > The "must" in the new meaning is an accidental byproduct of > > conversion to the new language. > > Accidental or not, it has been an established part of the > infrastructure for the whole life of ./debian/rules convention; and > ought not to be easy ro change.
You know, this philosophy goes against everything that one normally sees on a *nix platform. On Debian, one would normally not care what language an executable is written in. I run programs that are written in shell, C, Python, Perl, or other languages, usually oblivious to what language they're written in. Sometimes they even change. As long as they accept the same input and produce the same output, the implementation details like that are irrelevant to me the user. When packaging software for Debian, the user of debian/rules is the person building the package. The rules script is called like any other executable. The fact that it is written in make is irrelevant. The fact that you are using undocumented interfaces to debian/rules on occasion is also irrelevant. If you do not stick to the documented interfaces, you lose the ability in my eyes to express outrage when the interfaces you use change. -- John
