On 07/09/2011 05:14 AM, Gergely Nagy wrote: > I believe that when someone knows the underlying system, using helpers > is the way to go, because it makes not only your task easier, it also > makes it easier for others to understand the packaging. > We were talking about mentoring, and you are talking about someone "who knows the underlying system", and we should generalize and push them to use dh because of that. Isn't there is something wrong here? > NMUing something with a complex, home-built debian/rules is a pain in > the backside at best. > Come on! It's not. Most debian/rules using debhelper (and not CDBS or dh) looks nearly the same, with very little tweaks. > And yes, one does sacrifice a lot of control on the altar of > convenience. But I don't see that as a problem, there's nothing wrong > with convenience. And while useless helper scripts add to the build > time, that load is negligible. > > Even on the slowest machine I could get my hands on (emulated armel, > with ~256Mb memory, running on an dual-core amd64 host, along with 4 > other VMs), the difference between using dh $@ and explicit dh_* > commands on an average package was about 3 seconds. Completely getting > rid of debhelper and doing everything by hand made it 2 more seconds > faster. > > I don't know about you, but for 5 seconds, I'm not going to give up > convenience. > It really depends. If the package is really small, and if it takes 6 seconds in total to build, then skipping 5 seconds is a win. If it takes anyway 2 minutes, then yes, I don't care about 5 seconds.
> Then again, the beauty of Debian is that people are allowed to tailor > their packaging to their own liking (as long as it conforms to > policy... sadly a debian/rules written in SHOOP does not). There's > arguments for and against both helper-using and helper-less packaging, > neither is a silver bullet. > My point to give arguments about not using dh was *not* to start a troll thread about what is best practices. It was simply to tell that there are some arguments for and against using dh, and as a consequence, I found very bad to write in this list that not using dh was a bad idea. People like different things, and using a helper like dh or CDBS should *not* be a requirement written in this list. For this, Jakub is 100% right. At best, this would be a sponsor requirement (and for sure, it wont be mine, which is only to not use CDBS which I don't understand). So don't take me wrong. I'm not vouching *against* dh, in some cases I agree it might be convenient, but just not always, and at the end, it's more a mater of preferences. Thomas Goirand (zigo) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-mentors-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4e1843d4.7000...@debian.org
