Bug#430889: developers-reference: Please don't suggest vim as an example to follow

[Daniel Schepler <schepler@math.unipd.it>]

Package: developers-reference
Version: 3.3.8
Severity: wishlist

In section 6.1.3 of the version of developers-reference on www.debian.org, 
it's suggested to follow the example of vim for a package requiring multiple 
builds.  I have to disagree with this suggestion: vim's debian/rules build 
target just builds in the same place multiple times and cleans in between, 
copying out the binaries when a build is done.  But there's a reason why in 
most packages we don't have debian/rules build remove all the intermediate .o 
and other files.

The sane way to handle this is to create multiple build directories to keep 
the intermediate files from each build.  Even if the source doesn't support 
out-of-tree building, this can be done by using a tarball-in-tarball 
approach, or doing something like "for d in config1 config2 ...; do mkdir -p 
build/$d; cp -al `ls -1|grep -v debian|grep -v build` build/$d/; done".  A 
couple examples of this that I can think of off the top of my head are 
apache2 and lyx.
-- 
Daniel Schepler