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

[Matthias Klose <doko@debian.org>]

Manoj Srivastava schrieb:
> On Mon, Mar 16 2009, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> 
>> On Sun, 15 Mar 2009, Bill Allombert wrote:
>>> There is no documented semantic for CFLAGS et. al. in Debian policy. While 
>>> some Makefile handle it in a certain way, this is not mandatory in
>>> any way. For example some configure scripts append options to CFLAGS while
>>> other will not change it if it is defined.
>> This is precisely what I want to change. We should provide a reasonable
>> way for the user/admin to give default flags and for the packager to
>> override/extend the default set of flags.
> 
>         So here are what I think we need, based on the most common use
>  cases:
> 
>  A) Provide a way to specify project wide defaults for env variables
>  B) Allow a site admin to selectively override these, and provide site
>     wide defaults
>  C) Allow a package to set some flags that would otherwise break the
>     package, overriding site and/or project defaults as needed
>  D) Allow the user to specify and override any of the above.

E) Provide a way to specify project wide defaults and override any of the above.
This is much needed to for rebuild checks ignoring package specific work
arounds. Currently workarounds tend to live forever, and there is no way to
automatically override those.

>         I do not see any reason to limit ourselves to one tool to set
>  the env variables, especially since it prevents the package maintainer
>  from distinguishing between the project wide defaults anduser set
>  values, and has no easy way  for a site to set site wide values. Hey, I
>  might like hardening flags the project does not  cater to when I
>  rebuild the archive on my buildd -- and the snippet approach allows for
>  it.

maybe, but for E) a package should honour these overwrite flags.

  Matthias