Re: buildinfo.debian mit debhelper ?
James Troup <J.J.Troup@scm.brad.ac.uk> writes:
> Say, what? Sorry, but this is complete rubbish. buildinfo.Debian
> files as produced by debmake are utterly useless for telling you
> anything about source depends. All it does is tell you what versions
> of a set of pre-set packages[1] were installed when the package was
> built[2], it tells you nothing about whatever exotic libraries a
> package might need to be built or random programs used by the build
> process.
>
> There may be an argument for buildinfo.Debian files (I've yet to see
> it), but this surely isn't it.
>
> [1] "dpkg -l gcc 'libc*' debmake binutils ldso make dpkg-dev | awk '$1 ~ /^.i/ { printf("%s-%s\n", $2, $3) }' >tmp/usr/doc/$PACKAGE/buildinfo.Debian"
> \begin{rant}Couldn't the damn thing be a little more clever than
> "libc*"? phaf\end{rant}
>
> [2] It won't even tell you what was used to build the package; if
> gforth were debstd-ised, the buildinfo.Debian file would still
> list gcc despite the fact that gforth uses and requires egcc to
> build. Tres useful.
Yes, I completely agree with your point here. However, how am I
supposed to indicate, for instance, that a package was build with,
say, g++ rather than eg++. Ok, sure, an educated user might be able
to derive that form the shlibs involved, but not necessarily.
And why would anyone care to have this rather pseudo-source-depends
data? I guess that's another issue; I didn't make that decision a
priori that a user wouldn't care so I decided to build and ship the
file with the binary package. It's a record of what was used to build
the binary package; it helps me as a maintainer to have this data
around historically.
Actually I can think of a case where a user defineately might care.
Suppose I ship a package with a lot of documentation in it, in SGML,
HTML, and PS formats. It would be very useful to know the versions of
the tools I used to make the packages (i.e., sgml-data, jade), even
though these "source dependacies" might not be part of the binary
dependancies. Why would they care? Well suppose they were trying to
rebuild the PS files as A4 or legal for printing, and they're hitting
some problems.
--
.....A. P. Harris...apharris@onShore.com...<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
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