Re: Consensus Call: Do We Want to Require or Recommend DH; comments by 2019-06-16
Bill Allombert <ballombe@debian.org> writes:
> The magic of dh comes by making assumption on the upstream build system.
> When these assumptions are correct then it is much less verbose than
> debhelper. When they are not correct the maintainer needs to override
> all incorrect guesses, in addition to writing the correct code, at which
> point the benefit of dh is greatly reduced.
This statement is quite contrary to my experience with dh. The magic of
dh is to automate the normal sequence of debhelper commands, which is far
more than just integrating with the upstream build system. When upstream
has an odd build system, I usually only have to override three dh
sequences (dh_auto_configure, dh_auto_build, and dh_auto_install); the
vast majority of dh and its accompanying simplification is still intact,
and the resulting overrides are still the same as or less verbose than
writing the equivalent code with debhelper.
The magic of dh is not having to remember what order you have to put
dh_strip and dh_fixperms in, or to remmeber to include dh_lintian when I
add an override, or to allow us to add dh_strip_nondeterminism globally
for most packages in Debian without requiring a mass bug filing.
> Updating dh to a new compat level might include extra assumption that
> will then need to be overrided.
The same is true of using any packaging helper that uses debhelper, and is
still true for new versions of Policy even if you hand-code everything.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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