Passing build options to debian/rules (was Re: Migration to Pentium?)
On Tue, Jan 23, 2001 at 08:43:59AM -0800, Aaron Lehmann wrote:
> I'd like to use apt to build a kind of ports system, or in a Debian
> sense, a "personal autobuilder". This system would use Depends and
> Build-Depends to decide which packages need building, and would
> automate the builds using your personal optimizations and CFLAGS.
> However, I feel very strongly that such a system should provide a good
> mechanism to control how specific packages are built. For example, I
> want my X-Chat built without gdk-pixbuf, perl, python, or nls, but
> with debugging symbols (let's say). My autobuilder should let me
> maunually override the maintainer's default options for this pakcage,
> and preferably remember these settings for future revisions. This
> could be done by storing diffs against the standard debian/ files that
> contained customizations of the rules file, control file, etc..
>
> I'm thinking about starting to construct such a system.
It seems the only hard part in this is to have a standard mechanism for passing
flags to configure. Currently, we have:
- DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS, which takes care of debugging information
- CFLAGS, which is sometimes (though not often enough) inherited from the
environment. Perhaps policy should specify that CFLAGS in the environment
should be honored? Currently, pentium-builder works around this by adding
the flags in a wrapper script for gcc.
- CONFIGURE_FLAGS (hypothetical), which would allow for custom options to be
passed to an autoconf-generated configure script. autoconf is the closest
thing we have to a standard way to build a package in different
configurations, so we are probably better off trying to standardize on it
than to support many different systems. I believe that options later in
the command line override earlier ones, so maintainers would only need to
add $(CONFIGURE_FLAGS) after their existing ones.
--
- mdz
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