Re: Environment variables, debian/rules and dpkg-buildpackage

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> writes:

> I can understand you were not happy with the way the change was done but
> saying dpkg-bp is broken is strong (and wrong). If you really believed
> that a major mistake was done at that time, you could have complained
> louder and you could have asked for a tech-ctte ruling. We also offered
> to retract the change to the release team but they did not deem it
> necessary.

Well, I tried to bring it up at the time, but it seemed clear that you
felt strongly that it was the right way forward and there were only a few
who objected (although I suspect that's because not that many people
realized at the time all of the implications).  I suppose I could have
appealed it to the tech-ctte, but that seemed unnecessarily
confrontational given that the actual negative effect on the archive at
the moment was relatively minor.  Most of my concern was over packages
starting to rely on this behavior of dpkg-buildpackage, thus making it
difficult to use a different solution.

At the time, I didn't think of the makefile fragment idea that Manoj has
proposed.  If I had thought of that, I would have pushed that, since I
think it addresses the core goal in a much cleaner fashion.  At the time,
I had no good alternative solution.

I thought at the time about making a bigger deal about it, but I didn't
really want to just start a flamewar and it seemed like a poor way to
thank you for all of the other work that you were doing on
dpkg-buildpackage.

At the time, I think it was more important to worry about finishing the
lenny work.  I'm very glad that you've re-raised the discussion, and I
really appreciate you doing so.  Hopefully we can find a solution that
makes everyone happy for squeeze.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>