Re: CDBS and dh_install
On Fri, Jun 09, 2006, martin f krafft wrote:
> This is my opinion and others will disagree:
> Please don't. CDBS is a major pain to use for those who didn't
> (co-)author it. It's just too much about obfuscation.
Yeah, I and others we disagree! :)
CDBS makes maintenance of some packages damn easy: most changes are
done in debian/* files, where they belong.
Here's some piece of pure statistics, completely biased by the fact all
sources come from the same project:
- we have 84 GNOME "desktop" packages
- 71 of these are CDBS
- they have an average debian/rules length of 18 lines (empty lines
included, 13 lines if you exclude empty lines)
Of course, the shortest code is not necessarily the easiest to read,
but I don't consider these lines to be obfuscated either. They might
be CDBS specific though, and require some CDBS understanding to parse.
My "feeling" is that CDBS works best with upstream tarballs following a
standard layout. CDBS pushes us into storing meta-information about
the Debian packaging in separate files (debian/*.install,
debian/*.examples, debian/*.docs). (Yes, this is an indirect
consequence of debhelper being well thought.)
The debian/rules ends up storing the _delta_ between what a normal
package would do and what is needed for this particular package.
But I understand CDBS can be slightly dangerous in subtle cases, and
difficult to grasp the first time you encounter CDBSized packages.
It's an useful evil.
--
Loïc Minier <lool@dooz.org>
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