Re: dpkg-buildpackage now sets DEB_BUILD_HOST etc for you?

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Hi Wookey,

Wookey wrote:

> I recently noticed that when building with dpkg-buildpackage there is
> no need for the 
>
> DEB_BUILD_GNU_TYPE     := $(shell dpkg-architecture -qDEB_BUILD_GNU_TYPE)
> DEB_HOST_GNU_TYPE      := $(shell dpkg-architecture -qDEB_HOST_GNU_TYPE)

Don't you mean "?="?

[...]
> You can just do the test:
> ifeq ($(DEB_BUILD_GNU_TYPE),$(DEB_HOST_GNU_TYPE))
>
> and it works, so it looks like dpkg-buildpackage is now setting those
> vars for us. This is good and sensible, it's just that it's news to me.
>
> Anyone know when this happened and what if any, the limitations are?

It happened years ago, but it's not guaranteed by policy.  As you
wrote:

[...]
> Now, you can build packages without using dpkg-buildpackage by calling
> rules directly, and in that case the rules file would need to call
> dpkg-architecture, but someone would have to convince me that that was
> an interface worth supporting for non-native builds, because I
> have certainly always considered the minimal interface for cross
> package-building to be dpkg-buildpackage -a<arch>, and in practice
> there are other things you need to do for non-trivial packages (set
> CONFIG_SITE, set DEB_BUILD_OPTS=nocheck).

I believe invoking debian/rules by hand is an interface worth
supporting, even for cross builds, but the person calling debian/rules
by hand is certainly responsible for setting DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=nocheck!

Hope that helps,
Jonathan