Re: Binaryless uploads [Was: FTBFS: architecture all packages]
On Mon, Aug 18, 2003 at 11:44:48AM +0200, Andreas Barth wrote:
> * Joe Wreschnig (piman@debian.org) [030818 04:50]:
> > the archive anyway. Plus, I would like to think that most maintainers
> > are smart enough to try building their packages at least *once* before
> > uploading them.
>
> If the maintainers were smart enough, we wouldn't have this
> discussion. We're only discussing because there _is_ a package that's
> unbuildable from source.
Strictly speaking, this is not true.
webmin is buildable by source.
I think even debian/rules works. However, the binary produced by
debian/rules is very much different to the binary available in the
archive.
It would appear that the maintainer doesn't understand that you can have
one source package in Debian generate multiple binary packages.
Hence, the maintainer has written a custom script (read: hack) that will
split the tar.gz upstream tar ball into one tarball for every package,
and build each one seperately.
This has two limitations:
1. seperate source for every package, when it isn't required.
2. doesn't build using standard debian/rules build process.
To quote the README.Debian file:
--- cut ---
Creating the Debian webmin packages
-----------------------------------
Webmin is distributed upstream as one big tarball containing all the
modules. As a package cannot go into testing unless all its' dependencies
are in it too, and a .deb that contains everything would have a lot of
dependencies (any one of which could keep it out of testing,) I decided it
would be better to split the webmin tarball into sperate packages, one for
each module. I have a script that automates much of this process. It can
be found in the debian directory of the webmin source package.
--- cut ---
The maintainer was informed of the problem, but lowered the
serverity of the bug. He seems to think that fixing this bug would be
difficult. He also seems to think that fixing it isn't that important,
because the autobuilders never touch it. I would suggest though that
the solution would be *much* simpler then his current method. A quick
glance seems to indicate that all that is needed is to list all binary
packages in debian/control, and use dh_movefiles as appropriate.
If source-only-uploads were enforced, it would prevent binary packages
like this ever getting into the archive.
This isn't meant to be an attack on the maintainer by any means,
simply to illustrate that Debian, since it has become so large,
has maintainers with different levels of experience and understanding
how things work. It would be good if we could build more safe guards
to prevent obvious things like this from going wrong.
Also it would be good if Policy highlighted that binary-all
packages must be buildable from debian/rules to result in a similar
deb package. If it ddoesn't already do so.
--
Brian May <bam@debian.org>
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