On 00-12-02 Stefan Hornburg wrote:
> Christian Kurz <shorty@debian.org> writes:
> > On 00-12-01 Stefan Hornburg wrote:
> > > Petr Cech <cech@atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz> writes:
> > > > On Fri, Dec 01, 2000 at 12:20:13PM +0100 , Stefan Hornburg wrote:
> > > > > How can I work around the following problem. I don't know
> > > > > if a package contains shared libraries, but it may.
> > > >
> > > > no. it should read "if it contains arch specific packages"
> > > >
> > > > > If not, dpkg-gencontrol doesn't accept the build
> > > > > because it sees
> > > > >
> > > > > Depends: ,courier-base
> > > > >
> > > > > The control file reads:
> > > > >
> > > > > Depends: ${shlib:Depends}, courier-base
> > > >
> > > > if it has no binary packages so why put it there in the first place?
> >
> > > There are scenarios where this could be useful:
> > > - you don't know if shared libraries needed
> >
> > How should this happen? If you build the binaries, you will normally
> > notice if shared libs are necessary or not. Can you please give an
> > example where you don't know it?
> Joe Drew provided an example.
Well, I think this distributed.net is a special case and not the normal
case. Debian Package tools can't work around every special case. Theu
should be target against the normal every day work of debian package
maintainers. And that's what they currently do.
> > > - you use dh_perl and ${perl:Depends} and upstreams remove
> > > the only Perl script
> >
> > Then you should remove this calls. As you should test and check your
> > package before uploading it to the archive, you will get to notice and
> > fix this.
> Sure I notice this, but why I should do unneeded extra work
> (dpkg-gencontrol can easily remove this).
No, this is no extra work. Since you have an unncessary call to
dpkg-gencontrol which is doing nothing. So this calls should be removed
from the package building process. The package building process should
only consist of the necessary calls to make and the debian helper tools,
that are needed and not include unnecessary system calls.
> > > After all, data processing
> > > - should be liberal to the format of user input
> > > - very strict in its own input
> >
> > > So, if dpkg tools complain over missing newlines at EOF,
> > > empty package names in depends, empty newlines at end
> > > of control files (with a confusing error message),
> > > they are unnecessarily annoying.
> >
> > No, missing newlines can be very important and need to be fixed.
> The only other tool I know of which expect a newline at EOF
> is cron and _that_ is annoying too.
Then start fixing dpkg and all under tools that relay on this newline at
EOF. Otherwise I'm very happy with the current setup.
> > Empty
> > package names in depends normally show that something with your
> > build-process is not set up correctly and needs to be fixed. Empty
> > Newlines and the end of control-files should be removed as the unnessary
> > increase the size of the control file and description of the package.
> Can be done automatically.
Should not, because this would mean that maintainers get more lazy about
their packages and decresae our quality. Maintainers should always be
very accurate and careful with their package and the control-file. If
not, they should get bugged bu the package building tools until they get
those newlines and so on fixed until the package is in a good shape.
Ciao
Christian
--
Debian Developer and Quality Assurance Team Member
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