Interesting delema (xfig, debhelper, and doc-base in frozen slink)

[Edward Betts <edward@hairnet.demon.co.uk>]

Hello,

Allow me to introduce myself, I am the maintainer of xfig. Having been very
busy recently i let Roland Rosenfeld <roland@spinnaker.rhein.de>, do an NMU to
fix some problems with the package, and I fine job he did too.

I downloaded the new debian diff and dsc and used my current source to try and
do myself a build. Unfortunatly the build failed. It turns out the package
will only build on slink not potateo. If I make some modifications it will
build on potateo but not slink.

Let me explain, one of the things that Roland kindly did was to add doc-base
support. He placed a doc-base file in the debian dir and added some code to
debian/rules to install it. All happy and it builds fine in slink. But in
potateo debhelper notices, when I run dh_installdocs the debian/rules, the 
doc-base file and tries to install it in the first package, xfig, when it 
belongs in the second package built from this source xfig-doc.

If I rename the debian/doc-base to debian/xfig-doc.doc-base and take Roland's
no code for installing doc-base out of the debian/rules it works fine in
potateo with the new version of debhelper, but not in slink. If I leave things
as they are then it will build in slink but not potateo.

Obviously I can not release a package into slink that will not build in slink
so modifying it for debhelper is not an option.

Leaving it as it is, is fine long as no porters are compiling on potateo.

I could rename the debian/doc-base to debian/leave.alone.dh.doc-base or
something like that and it would compile in both. Or i could add a
dh_version > 1.20 which would warn people straight away about using
potateo. However we are depth freeze now and is this upload really needed? 
Are there lots of porters running potateo?

thoughts? suggestions? comments?

-- 
GNU does not eliminate all the world's problems, only some of them.
                                                -- The GNU Manifesto