Fwd: Patch for haskell-devscripts to install executables into the corresponding debian package

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: David Fox <ddssff@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 9:58 AM
Subject: Re: Patch for haskell-devscripts to install executables into the corresponding debian package
To: Joachim Breitner <nomeata@debian.org>

On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 9:24 AM, Joachim Breitner <nomeata@debian.org> wrote:

Hi,

Am Donnerstag, den 23.07.2009, 08:56 -0700 schrieb David Fox:

> Packages like happy and hsx have an Executable: section in their cabal
> file which specifies the name of a binary file generated by the
> package. The attached patch to the hlibrary.mk file in
> haskell-devscripts causes it to move the executable file into the
> debian package with the same name.

Thanks for pushing this, it might be useful. What package do you plan
this for?

I only use it for the trhsx executable produced by the hsx package, and in
our debianization of happy.

There are already a few packages that do this in debian/rules directly
(xmonad, cpphs, hscolour, maybe others), can you test if your
haskell-devscripts breaks them? Then we would have to coordinate an
upload.

It doesn't break hscolour, but that may be because the executable is called HsColour
and the package is called hscolour. I'll check it out for the other packages.

Also, I have trouble understanding some parts of the patch:

Where is the common-binary-fixup-arch target called? Or is it a cdbs
standard?

Yes, this is a standard cdbs target.

What is the difference between
+ cp -ax dist-ghc6/build/$${EXEC}/$${EXEC} debian/$${DEBNAME}/usr/bin/$${EXEC}; \
and
+ install -m 755 dist-ghc6/build/$${EXEC}/$${EXEC} debian/$${DEBNAME}/usr/bin/$${EXEC}; \

Good question! I wrote this code a long time ago and haven't looked at it since. It looks
like the file may be a symlink, and this code converts it into a regular file if there is no
library package. Maybe someone out there knows more about it than I.

I also do not understand your comment to that target. Could you explain
it a bit more?

First I will have to study the situation a bit more.

Note that there might be packages that install more than one executable,
but that should all go in one package, or some binaries should go to the
-dev package. Then the name based automatism does not work. Maybe it’d
be more useful to have the maintainer, in debian/rules specify a
variable

CABAL_EXECUTABLES_FOR_packagename = exectuable1 executable2

and you rely on that in hlibrary.mk?

This might be a good thing, though I also like the simple way it works now.