Re: Increasing regularity of build systems
On Tue, Sep 14, 1999 at 02:31:30PM -0500, David Welton wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 14, 1999 at 10:23:50PM +0300, Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 14, 1999 at 11:39:05AM -0700, David N. Welton wrote:
>
> > > Joey Hess' debhelper scripts are a good API, maybe it would be
> > > good to standardize on them to some degree.
>
> > No.
>
> I didn't say "make them THE standard"
What did you mean then?
> I suggested that it may be a
> good idea to have a more standard API to use in rules files, to avoid
> too much diversity.
The rule file API is simple. Anything Make takes, debian/rules takes,
and the following targets are guaranteed to exist: build, binary-arch,
binary-indep, binary, clean. I think that's a pretty good API, and
forcing debhelper on everybody's throat will not touch this interface
at all.
> Currently, anarchy reigns within debian/rules,
> and it's a pain to work with.
Can you be more specific?
> Do you have any constructive criticism,
My constructive criticism is that you have not given any good reason for
making everybody use debhelper. If you had, I might have considered
reiterating the well-known old arguments against this idea. And you
can still do it.
> or a better alternative?
Yes. Don't standardise on debhelper. Rather fix the specific problems
you might have by amending policy to require certain things without
locking everybody down to a particular helper package. Right now your
concerns are vague and I'm not at all sure your proposed solution is a
good solution.
Besides, this all belongs in -policy, not -devel.
--
%%% Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho % gaia@iki.fi % http://www.iki.fi/gaia/ %%%
""
(John Cage)
Reply to: