Re: Do we want to Require or Recommend DH
On 5/13/19 3:57 PM, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> On May 13, Sam Hartman <leader@debian.org> wrote:
>
>> As promised, I'd like to start a discussion on whether we want to
>> recommend using the dh command from debhelper as our preferred build
>> system.
> I have already asked this last time, but nobody answered.
> I use debhelper in all of my packages but I have never switched to dh:
> why should I bother?
> "Everybody is doing this" is not much of an argument.
>
> Would dh really make a debian/rules file like these simpler to
> understand? Can somebody try to win me over with a patch? :-)
>
> https://salsa.debian.org/md/inn2/blob/master/debian/rules
Without looking much, without checking if the package even builds,
here's a possible result:
https://salsa.debian.org/zigo/inn2/blob/master/debian/rules
Admittedly, I haven't understood all of the hacks you did (what's the
$(no_package) thing for?).
It's only 15 lines shorter, but that's not the point. The point is that
it only declares things you are not doing like everyone else.
Now, I have another example, which is quite the opposite one of what you
gave as example:
https://salsa.debian.org/openstack-team/debian/openstack-debian-images/blob/debian/stein/debian/rules
Why would one want to switch that one to something else? The package,
basically, consists of a shell script and a man page only. The
minimalism of this package doesn't require an over-engineered dh
sequencer, does it? I'm happy the way the package is, and I don't think
I'd switch to the dh sequencer *UNLESS* someone has a better argument
than "it's new", or "debian/rules will be smaller", or even "it's going
to evolve without you even noticing it" (which is more scary than
anything else, which is IMO one of the defects of the dh sequencer).
Cheers,
Thomas Goirand (zigo)
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