Re: Potential MBF: packages failing to build twice in a row

["Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Tue, Aug 08, 2023 at 10:26:09AM +0200, Helmut Grohne wrote:
> As a minor data point, I also do not rely on `debian/rules clean` to
> work for reproducing the original source tree, because too many packages
> fail it.
> 
> Let me point out though that moving to git-based packaging is not the
> property that is relevant here. I expect that most developers use either
> sbuild or pbuilder for the majority of their builds. Both tools create a
> .dsc, copy that .dsc into a chroot, unpack, build, and dispose of it. So
> we effectively have at least three ways of cleaning source packages:
> 
> a) `debian/rules clean`
> b) Some VCS (and that's probably just git)
> c) Copy the source before build and dispose the entire copy

For what it's worth, my packages are managed using git, and some times
I'll use git-buildpackage (with sbuild as the backend), dgit (for
releases to unstable; but for some reasons it mysteriously fails when
doing uploads backports), as well as dpkg-buildpackage in the git
repository.

Because *do* run dpkg-buildpackage for my test builds, I actually have
an incentive to make "./debian/rules clean" work correctly, because
running dpkg-buildpackage leaves modified files all over the my
repository's working directory, and it's *useful* that "debian/rules
clean" gets my repository back to a clean state.  I could do "git
reset --hard", but sometimes I have locally modified files in working
directory, and "git reset --hard" would blast all of that, where as
"./debian/rules clean" does what I want.

Cheers,

						- Ted