Re: Bug#489771: New Build-Options field and build-arch option, please review
Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> writes:
> On Wed, 10 Sep 2008, Bill Allombert wrote:
>> I like to say I concurr with Russ. There are some much difference
>> between packages that distributions wide default does not make sense.
>> Such change would rather lead me to hardcode values of
>> DEBIAN_BUILD_OPTIONS in debian/rules if they are used blidly.
>
> But more and more people want to be able to change distribution wide
> default: Emdebian wants to enable "nodocs" and "nocheck" by default,
> other want to be able to enable hardening options by default and I agree
> with them that official support for such a facility is desirable.
So they should set DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS in the environment. That's what it's
for. I don't have any objections to that, or even to doing it via
dpkg-buildpackage.
My objection is specifically to having dpkg-buildpackage set a variety of
environment variables *by default*, and then telling package maintainers
that they should rely on those environment variables being set in the
default case. That breaks the debian/rules interface and requires that
all package builds go through dpkg-buildpackage. Having dpkg-buildpackage
set environment variables in the non-default case like Emdebian is not a
problem, since for Emdebian builds (for example) Emdebian can decide that
using dpkg-buildpackage or setting the environment variables manually is
required. There is no existing precedent, and they can make that rule
from scratch.
My concern is for the default build where there *is* an existing precedent
that debian/rules build should work sanely, not for support for special
cases like that where the existing debian/rules interface already doesn't
do the right thing without additional help.
If you are going to go down this path of having dpkg-buildpackage set up
an environment that package maintainers should rely on, you or someone
else on the dpkg team needs to make a debian-devel-announce post making it
clear that debian/rules build is no longer a supported interface for
building packages and using dpkg-buildpackage is required for consistent
behavior.
Right now, I don't think most Debian Developers have any idea what the
implications of these changes are.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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