Thought I'd run this by yous... (It proves I'm not a total
"non-researcher" and that I don't spend all of my time reading email
lists, playing video games, chatting on IRC or masturbating in
USENET. I actually indend to become a professional GNU/Linux
programmer as things progress around me faster than I can assimilate
all of "grep -vf flippancy < debian-*@lists.debian.org".)
I like to have a "debian/rules config" target distinct from the
"build" target. It could save a lot of time during testing and
development. Here's how I've begun to solve that problem for the
XEmacs 21 packages, in the form of a mockup of a rules script. In
the process of creating this, I've discovered many really neato
things about GNU `make'. We're probably spoiled... It sounds like
"other" versions of `make' are rather lame by comparison to the
athletic and brawny GNU rendition.
(I have NOT read all of the `autoconf' or `automake' manuals yet. I
plan to; I promise. What else should I read that may not be
obvious?)
How could this scheme be improved, generalized or extended, as you
see it? Should I develop it further for Debian? Will anyone else
utilize this if I spend the time it will take on it? (I likely won't
get paid for that time...)
Is there anything wrong with it? What? Detail... and how could that
be remedied?
The $(${pkg}-stage-commands) could easily become sets of debhelper
commands or whatever, rather than relying on the upstream makefile's
"install" target. I guess that's obvious.
I went as far as "config", "build" and "stage", but did not complete
it with "binary-arch" and "binary-indep" or "clean". Obviously the
real thing will have those important targets included. I think they
will follow a similar (if not the exact same) pattern. I'll make a
separate target for each package (using the demonstrated technique),
and then a global one calling those.
I hope this proves to be instructional or thought inspiring to a few
of yous. :-) It's time to get it off my desk before I write a book.
See also: `Recursive Make Considered Harmful', the GNU Make manual,
`autoconf', `automake', ...? What else, folks? Point the
way please. What else do I need to read? Where can I find
examples of similar things?
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