Re: Building package twice

[Simon Richter <sjr@debian.org>]

Hi,

On 12/8/25 7:50 PM, Giovanni Mascellani wrote:
> To do all of that I'd need to configure, compile and install the source 
> code twice when building the package, with different configuration 
> options. Is there a reasonably simple way to do that, possibly with 
> debhelper? Are there other packages doing this I can take as an example?

If you want an extreme example, webkit2gtk.

The simple way is to override dh_auto_configure and call 
dh_auto_configure multiple times with different parameters, then repeat 
for dh_auto_build, dh_auto_install, dh_auto_test and dh_auto_clean.

In rare cases, when the build itself uses make and doesn't parallelize 
well, it can make sense to override dh_auto_build with a dependency list 
and a dummy command:

    override_dh_auto_build: auto-build-conf1 auto-build-conf2
        @:

    auto-build-conf1:
        dh_auto_build -- ...

    auto-build-conf2:
        dh_auto_build -- ...

so the two sub-make invocations are run in parallel using the jobserver 
from the original debian/rules invocation. But as said, it is rather 
seldom that this provides a tangible benefit, and more difficult to read 
than just a sequence.

   Simon