Re: A list of common gotchas in Debian packaging
On Thu, May 04, 2006 at 04:50:29PM +0200, Simon Richter wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Panu Kalliokoski schrieb:
>
> >Some issues seem to come up time and again when somebody inspects RFS'd
> >packages. Some of these are not breaches of policy but simply bad
> >practices, like leaving quoted dh_* commands in debian/rules.
>
> I do that all the time. It is much easier to see that a program is not
> being run if it is explicitly commented out rather than just "not
> there", as Makefiles tend to be executed in interesting nonlinear ways,
> and it doesn't really hurt either. Even the slowest of our buildds can
> skip over these lines in less than a second, while if I screw up with
> these lines I'm wasting a lot more autobuilder time, archive bandwidth
> etc.[1]
>
> Simon
>
> [1] I'm half-joking here (I also throw out the commented-out dh_* lines
> when I get around to it). The point I'm trying to make is that there is
> such a thing as personal style, and sometimes a solution that appears
> suboptimal to you might be easier to work with for the actual
> maintainer, so I wouldn't attempt to micromanage here. It is an entirely
> different thing for corner cases that may lead to packages misbehaving;
> for example I consider the "-$(MAKE) distclean" line in the clean target
> of a lot of packages a bug because it will not clean up if the toplevel
> Makefile goes missing.
Agreed; my motivation for leaving commented lines around is that it is
arguably easier to merge with newer dh_make template files (if one
were to do that ..). The reason to not leave them around is that not
doing so indicates some level of familiarity and understanding, and
the ability to fix stuff if it breaks or needs improving.
Justin
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