Re: autmake & debian?

[kaih@khms.westfalen.de (Kai Henningsen)]

schwarz@monet.m.isar.de (Christian Schwarz)  wrote on 05.01.98 in <[🔎] Pine.LNX.3.96.980105200518.17436B-100000@monet>:

> The idea is to create the debian/rules file by a macro processor. (Since
> automake is used to create Makefiles and debian/rules is a Makefile,
> someone suggested to use it. However, doubts have been presented that it
> does not fit exactly to our purposes. Someone would have to do some
> experiments on this. If it doesn't fit, we can use or write another macro
> generator.)

I thought there was already consensus that automake was a very bad match  
for this.

I'm currently experimenting with writing an autodeb tool; very early stage  
yet, absolutely no promises at all of any kind. Any- and everyone is  
encouraged to write a different one. (Didn't Ian himself want to do it?  
He's surely better suited to that than I am :-))

My game plan:
  analyse debmake and similar packages for what to do
  do an autodeb-scan that creates debian/auto.proto
    which is a proposed debian/auto
  do an autodeb that creates debian/rules (and maybe other stuff) from
    debian/auto, possibly via some .new prefix so people can verify it
    does what they want first
  do everything in perl, debian/auto uses Data::Dumper format to store
    settings

After working some hours on it today, I've come as far as producing stuff  
like this:

# generated by ./autodeb-scan

$auto1 = {
           "USERNAME" => "Kai Henningsen",
           "POLICY" => "2.3.0.1",
           "CONFIGURE" => "",
           "CLEAN" => "make clean",
           "DEBIAN" => "",
           "VERSION" => "0.0",
           "INSTALL" => "make install DESTDIR=`pwd`/debian/tmp",
           "EMAIL" => "kai\@khms.westfalen.de",
           "DOCS" => [],
           "PACKAGE" => "autodeb",
           "DATE" => "Mon,  5 Jan 1998 19:22:44 +0100",
           "PACKAGES" => [
                           "i:autodeb",
                           "o:autodeb-doc"
                         ]
         };

No rules generation yet.

This is obviously all highly subject to change. It's not as if I didn't  
have lots of ideas how to change it :-)

> This would have the advantage that every action would be included
> explicitely in the debian/rules file instead of hidden into some
> utilities.

Well, some could still be in well-defined utilities, if there's stuff  
that's hard to do in a makefile. (I don't know yet if there will be  
something like that.)

> It would be nice if we could find one (or more) volunteers to do some
> experiments on that issue.

Here where the hand is waving :-)


MfG Kai


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