On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 08:36:13AM +1000, Russell Stuart wrote:
> To state the bleeding obvious, it arises because on day 1 Debian
> decided to do the builds in the original source tree, then tries to
> recover the original source at the end by running "debian/rules clean".
> When I moved from rpm's to deb over a decade ago, I was surprised by
> this. Rpm's create temp build directory, so the "debian/rules clean"
> step can be handled reliably 100% of the time by the rpm build tool.
Indeed.
> Later when I started to work on other peoples packages it became
> apparent that many of the Romans didn't bother with it. So the
> debian/rules binary; dpkg --install; test; debian/rules clean; fix;
> rinse and repeat cycle doesn't work at all for maybe 1/3 of packages,
> and another 1/3 occasionally fail when something goes wrong during the
> patch / build process.
This is a policy violation and people are filing bug reports about such
problems. Still, I've always seen that as "more work for nothing" because
of the same reasons as you. The feature of exporting the build tree in
{svn,git}-buildpackage is a blessing and I always use it for packages that
use those tools, including all of mine.
--
WBR, wRAR
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