On Tue, 17 May 2005 03:45:28 +0200, Jeroen van Wolffelaar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
said:
> On Tue, May 17, 2005 at 11:35:56AM +1000, Ben Finney wrote:
>> I'd like to submit patches for a couple of packages that currently
>> use hand-rolled debian/rules files. Is the current best practise to
>> use debhelper, or cdbs, or something else?
> I don't think there's really consensus on it, but from personal
> experience, I highly favour debhelper for reasons of least surprise:
> - What's going on is mostly clear, it's in fact 'basicly' a library
> of command snippets
I prefer to have these command (usually, mv, cp, gzip, etc)
explicitly present, so one does not have to go looking through the
library to guess what is being done.
> - No makefile fu, easily debuggeable because there's a clear place
> to put extra code at each step, and because of DH_VERBOSE. Flow of
> control is easy when not having expert makefile fu in
> debian/rules, and most people are no makefile experts
make -n -p produces all the debugging information I have ever
needed. And, as a software developer, I do consider make an important
part of my tool set, even before Debian (ofr linux) existed, and used
often even outside Debian's context.
> - No need to migrate away from cdbs at any time you need to do
> something complicated not catered for in cdbs (in cdbs you require
> to have hooks available for what you want, rather than that being
> automatically available)
I also don't need to worry about how to make any helper
commands like dh_please_install_my_man_pages_pretty_please do what I
want done -- cp is pretty easy to figure out.
> - Does not encourage evil things like build-time rewriting of
> debian/control
Plain ol' simple rules file do not need such bletcherousness
either.
> - Much more mature, cdbs is still in high flux, and iirc a rewrite
> (cdbs2) is planned or underway
Hmm. Make has been around since circa '79, cp, mv, are even
older, and I am not sure about install, but I am pretty sure it is
more "mature" than Linux, if age is a sign of maturity.
> - And last but not least, debhelper is used in much more packages
> than cdbs, and greater familiarity exists amongst DD's and other
> maintainers
There are vastly more people who know simple POSIX tools than
there are those who know distribution specific tool sets.
> This is my personal opinion, but real bugs are backed by this, like
> the most recent one I encountered: #309367
I could, but in charity I shall not, point to cases where the
helper packages are used as a crutch, with the developer having no
idea what was going on , and copying rules files around, engaging in
cargo cult programming.
It all comes down to what the maintainer prefers, and how they
want to put their packages together.
manoj
--
UFOs are for real: the Air Force doesn't exist.
Manoj Srivastava <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/>
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