Re: debtags support proposed for xcontrol
On Sun, 6 Apr 2008, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
The benefit of -Debtags
support in xcontrol is to offer CDD developers a method to automate that
process.
... which would be great.
Due to CDD metapackage package dependency lists currently being
maintained by hand, they tend to only infrequently be updated.
Uhmmmm, I don't agree with this sentence. ;-)
We have means to include even not yet available packages (we
call it "Prospective Packages" [1] and so we are prepeared evn
before the package shows up in Debian. Once it is there it
becomes automatically included in the list of Dependencies
in the control file after package rebuild. At least we in the
Debian-Med team make heavy use of it because I watch WNPP
closely and include any relevant WNPP just in time.
Implementing this xcontrol feature makes it possible for CDD
developers to...:
1) autobuild auto-updated packages unofficially (comparable to
packages built automatically from VCS snapshots)
2) manually trigger an update locally, and commit it to VCS
Which would be an extra benefit anyway.
a) Always regenerate but fail build if control file content change
b) Only regenerate when some environment flag is set
Perhaps as we do it in cdd-dev:
c) Generate debian/control inside get-orig-source target
of debian/rules and have no debian/control file at all
before. You just build the source tarball and once
it got the debian/control file start building the
package using pdebuild (or something like that)
independently from package releases. So the recommended use of this
xcontrol feature is with method b).
Also c) would work.
Even my limited proposal is far better than current hand-editing (which
does not treat backports specially either :-P )
ACK.
Kind regards and thanks for working on this
Andreas.
[1] http://people.debian.org/~tille/cdd/ch-sentinel.en.html#s-packageslist
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