Re: Stag and the Emdebian composite method.
Hiya!
Sorry, I have had no time to write the stuff we were discussing a few
weeks back. I do think it is probably a better thing to do than to
rewrite all the other packages....
Julian
On Wed, Nov 29, 2006 at 09:58:11PM +0000, Neil Williams wrote:
> I've been looking at how I can start building emdebian packages -
> starting with libglib2.0-0 - and as part of this, I've been taking a
> look at Stag.
>
> 1. The Stag addons in Emdebian SVN are quite a bit behind current
> Debian unstable: Stag is based on:
>
> debhelper 4.2.11
> dpkg 1.10.22
>
> Debian unstable, as of November 2006, has:
>
> debhelper 5.0.42
> dpkg 1.13.24
>
> 2. The Stag scripts use the emdebian/ directory ($DEBIAN_DIR) method.
>
> So I've done a few comparisons to see where the land lies with
> reference to the composite method proposed on the Wiki.
>
> If I've read the emdebian stag-addons SVN code correctly, removing the
> need for $DEBIAN_DIR and emdebian/* has removed the need to modify the
> bulk of the debhelper scripts modified in Stag. There are no changes in
> the customised Perl library: EmDebian::Debhelper::Dh_Lib beyond
> handling $DEBIAN_DIR so the original Debian::Debhelper::Dh_Lib library
> can be used. This removes a burden from us because we don't need to
> keep a patched version updated.
>
> Also, I've looked at each of the individual scripts in
> emdebian/stag-addons/trunk/debhelper in SVN and compared with the
> originals in the same folder.
>
> Of 46 scripts, only FIVE have modifications that go beyond handling
> $DEBIAN_DIR or the use of EmDebian::Debhelper::Dh_Lib.
>
> These five scripts are modified only to the point of being emptied of
> content and made into placeholders. i.e. simply *not running* these
> scripts is directly equivalent to the Stag debhelper config as it is
> outlined in emdebian SVN.
>
> The five scripts are:
>
> dh_installdocs
> dh_installexamples
> dh_installinfo
> dh_installman
> dh_installmanpages
>
> I'd welcome any comments on this review from those with more experience
> of Stag, but it does look like a simple tweak of debian/rules that
> specifically comments out / removes these five scripts with a simple
> regular expression will be sufficient to simulate a Stag build. CDBS
> packages can be handled simply by substituting a cdbs ruleset that
> avoids running these scripts. Naturally, em_make would be able to do
> this for us so that emdebianising a Debian package achieves three tasks:
>
> 1. Create an emdebian version string and a suitable entry in
> debian/changelog
> 2. Create the locale packages and entries in debian/control
> 3. Comment out/remove these five scripts from debian/rules or add the
> masking CDBS ruleset.
>
> Hopefully, this will dramatically reduce the size of the emdebian.diff
> patches to be held in SVN and the number of packages that will need any
> patches stored in SVN in the first place.
>
> I'll be looking at the dpkg code next, looking at what code may need to
> be implemented in emdebian scripts to handle differences between Debian
> and Stag.
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