dpkg 1.4.0.2 and others - my comments

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Thanks re most of that: the version comparison fixes look good to me,
as does the reversal of the quoting change in dpkg-buildpackage and
the various typo fixes, and the change to dpkg-buildpackage's passing
of options.

Your deoctify function looks buggy to me; I don't think splitting on \
is the right thing to do.  What if (for example) the string happens to
start with digits ?  I think you should do something like:
  $out='';
  while ($in =~ m/\\(\d{3})/) { $out.=$`.oct($1); $in=$'; }
  $out.=$in;

Re your comment in the dpkg-buildpackage manpage about
gain-root-command having spaces.  ATM it gets broken into separate
command and arguments according to the overly complicated shell
globbing rules, but I can see that this might change if (for example)
dpkg-buildpackage ever becomes a shell or Perl script.  Hence the
imprecation not to do that.

Re Juergen Menden's problems with rc?.d not existing: well Don't Do
That Then.  I don't consider this a bug in dpkg, and will close #4584
when I get around to it.  I don't think that workarounds should be
added for this.  If rc?.d directories don't exist then things will
break anyway, for example when update-rc.d is run.

Thanks to those who answered Dirk Eddelbuettel's bug #4729, that
dpkg-buildpackage is happy to build a package without a Depends line.
I agree that this is sensible and that the bug should be closed.

Ian.

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