Re: [PATCH/RFC] dpkg-shlibdeps: ignore shell scripts

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> On Wed, 21 Apr 2010, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

>> It can be convenient in debian/rules to simply run
>> 
>>   dpkg-shlibdeps debian/tmp/usr/bin/*
>
> Why? I mean dh_shlibdeps already does the right thing and is passing
> binaries only to dpkg-shlibdeps.

Two reasons:

 - not all packages use debhelper [1] (really!)
 - dpkg-shlibdeps is in a better position to check at the right time,
   as I mentioned in my previous message.

>> any file
>> starting with the two bytes #! is assumed to be a script.
[...]
> That would be the wrong thing to check. We want to verify if it's a
> ELF object and if not then we skip it.

Makes sense.

> And we should not skip it silently
> IMO as it was explicitly passed in a list of stuff to analyze.

This I don’t agree with.  Maybe there should be a command-line option
to say “I am including some non-binaries, too”.

Jonathan

[1] A certain kind of person would say “And so what?  Such packages
should be changed as soon as possible.”  So I guess it is also
relevant to say that I personally believe it to be a good thing that
not all packages use debhelper, since

 1) it makes it easier to change debhelper, since other packaging
    systems reveal bugs that come from assuming its current
    implementation.

 2) it makes it easier to come up with something better than debhelper
    (or than such-and-such particular helper script), since breaking
    some package-specific packaging system during an experiment will
    not break almost every package in the Debian archive.

 3) it makes it easier to bootstrap a new architecture.