Re: A debian/rules target to rebuild pre-built stuff?
Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> writes:
> On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 11:06 AM, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> The results of that build seem unlikely to ever be seriously tested
>> currently, which makes me a little dubious that it's worth making a
>> rule about it.
> I would wager that majority of such results would be tested during the
> build process.
Wouldn't that require using this target by default?
Or do you mean that *if* someone uses this target, then a simple package
build will test it? Hm, maybe. There are a lot of failures that will be
caught that way, but some that won't (Autotools failures can just mean not
finding supporting libraries, for instance).
>> Or, put another way, I'm not sure that this is substantially less
>> controversial than just requiring debian/rules build rebuild everything
>> from source.
> That seems unlikely given that there are many many packages using
> autotools-based build systems.
Either way, you're requiring the package maintainer to do the work to
create a target that rebuilds all that stuff. It's actually somewhat more
work to implement an optional target than to just make build do that. And
either way, they're going to be responsible for making sure it works,
except that under this proposal the buildds wouldn't test it for them.
I suppose there's the different between "should" and "must" which takes
some of the pressure off (although I suspect that will just lead to people
ignoring it).
I think I'd rather push people to use the dh add-on that regenerates all
the autotools files, since that makes things relatively easy provided that
the upstream files actually work with the latest versions.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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