Ian Zimmerman wrote: > What is the story behind these 2 packages? It is really more debmake and debhelper than debmake and dh-make.
[ dh-make is just a tool to ease the creation of debhelper-based debian/* files, but you can also use debhelper without dh-make ]. > Which one was first, debmake was first, it started on late 1996. Then it was debhelper, which started one year later. > what was the rationale for creating the other, debmake has a single binary, debstd, which tries to do everything. debhelper has a lot of dh_* scripts, each one does a different thing so you can use five, ten, or all of them in your debian/rules, according to your particular needs. This makes it more modular and flexible. There are also some design differences. > and why do we still have both? Like everything in Debian, a package exists as long as somebody is willing to maintain it.
