On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 11:21:42AM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote: > There are also the few packages in the archive that don't have a makefile > as debian/rules. I've been tempted for some time to file RC bugs against > all of them.
> http://lintian.debian.org/tags/debian-rules-not-a-makefile.html Interestingly, all but one of these is a false positive, at least in the sense of whether debian/rules is a makefile. The vdr packages don't use /usr/bin/make as the interpreter line, but debian/rules *is* a makefile - they just have a rather convoluted custom script that they use to set up the environment before calling make. That leaves just 'leave' which is using a shell script as debian/rules. Every time this issue has come up before, Josip has stuck to his guns on using a non-makefile for this package; but it is a policy violation, and if being able to rely on debian/rules being a makefile helps us finally unblock the build-arch mess, I don't think it's defensible. I'm all in favor of enforcing this policy dictum as RC for squeeze. > > Policy would match the current usage, right then. This is not what I'd > > like to see, since I think that a reliable build-arch would be a really > > nice thing to have. > I have to admit that I'm tempted by this approach, mostly because it's not > clear to me that the build-arch vs. build-indep separation actually gains > us anything that useful. The point, so far as I can tell, is to save > buildd time by not building the architecture-independent packages. How > much time would we actually be saving? Is it worth putting a lot of human > effort into making that situation possible? Generally CPU cycles are far, > far cheaper than human cycles. In some cases, building the arch-indep documentation takes longer, and requires downloading/installing more build dependencies, than building the arch-dep binaries. I've found this to be a waste of human cycles before when building packages locally: since it's not possible to bypass the "build-indep" component in a sane fashion, I wind up waiting on the arch-indep bits when trying to test out a patch that only affects the arch-dependent parts of the package. If the doc building is expensive enough to be noticeable to me when building on amd64, I would imagine that the impact on buildds (and hand builds) for slower archs is significant, too. If we can ever settle on a suitable implementation, I would expect the savings of both human and CPU cycles to be sizeable, and worth the effort. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
