Re: Proposed release goal: fix debian/rules build-arch
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 11:21:42AM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> There are also the few packages in the archive that don't have a makefile
> as debian/rules. I've been tempted for some time to file RC bugs against
> all of them.
> http://lintian.debian.org/tags/debian-rules-not-a-makefile.html
Interestingly, all but one of these is a false positive, at least in the
sense of whether debian/rules is a makefile. The vdr packages don't use
/usr/bin/make as the interpreter line, but debian/rules *is* a makefile -
they just have a rather convoluted custom script that they use to set up the
environment before calling make.
That leaves just 'leave' which is using a shell script as debian/rules.
Every time this issue has come up before, Josip has stuck to his guns on
using a non-makefile for this package; but it is a policy violation, and if
being able to rely on debian/rules being a makefile helps us finally unblock
the build-arch mess, I don't think it's defensible. I'm all in favor of
enforcing this policy dictum as RC for squeeze.
> > Policy would match the current usage, right then. This is not what I'd
> > like to see, since I think that a reliable build-arch would be a really
> > nice thing to have.
> I have to admit that I'm tempted by this approach, mostly because it's not
> clear to me that the build-arch vs. build-indep separation actually gains
> us anything that useful. The point, so far as I can tell, is to save
> buildd time by not building the architecture-independent packages. How
> much time would we actually be saving? Is it worth putting a lot of human
> effort into making that situation possible? Generally CPU cycles are far,
> far cheaper than human cycles.
In some cases, building the arch-indep documentation takes longer, and
requires downloading/installing more build dependencies, than building the
arch-dep binaries. I've found this to be a waste of human cycles before
when building packages locally: since it's not possible to bypass the
"build-indep" component in a sane fashion, I wind up waiting on the
arch-indep bits when trying to test out a patch that only affects the
arch-dependent parts of the package. If the doc building is expensive
enough to be noticeable to me when building on amd64, I would imagine that
the impact on buildds (and hand builds) for slower archs is significant,
too.
If we can ever settle on a suitable implementation, I would expect the
savings of both human and CPU cycles to be sizeable, and worth the effort.
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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