Re: alternative debian/rules

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

Hi!

On Mon, 2013-04-22 at 09:38:14 +0000, Thorsten Glaser wrote:
> Adam Borowski <kilobyte <at> angband.pl> writes:
> > It can be done
> 
> Well yes, but if you do even small things such as generate the
> package manually instead of using debhelper, prepare to be shouted
> at by the British Cabal with threats of using superpowers to remove
> such packages from Debian.

I went through (the long and repetitive) #690381, and I think the
threats there to unilaterally request for package removals are
completely out of place, more so when it comes to _requesting_ a
packaging style switch, which should be at most wishlist (if at all).
For things like this, people should be convinced with arguments not
by appeals to "authority" or "force". And then I'm not much convinced
by the arguments presented there, are we so accustomed to the various
helper tools that we've forgotten basic make and shell stuff?

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for unified packaging, and in my ideal
world we'd have a single, clean and elegant style/toolset able to
handle all needs (equally for trivial or complex packages), easily
extensible for global changes, etc, which I don't think we currently
have. But at the same time Debian has always been characterized by
its decentralized autonomy, which has allowed all different kinds of
experiments to flourish, and people have selected the solutions with
best merits (following Debian's meritocratic nature); or using the
best tool for the job in the maintainer's opinion. Coercing everyone
into the hive-mind will make us miss the next nicer solutions.

Thorsten, OTOH the deb format has supported GNU ar generated archives
for a very long time, it's documented in the man page. So while using
GNU ar to build deb:s should be generally discouraged when there's
dpkg-deb around, it should also be considered a supported action.

> (I mean, I see the point, but as long as things like cdbs or the,
> for many people unmaintainable due to being “too magic”, dh7 style
> are around… it’s unfair!)

Yeah, the day using debhelper means having to use dh-style rules,
I'll switch to something else.

Thanks,
Guillem