Re: Which targets are mandatory in debian/rules?

[Mitch Blevins <mblevin@mindspring.com>]

In foo.debian-mentors, you wrote:
> Mitch Blevins <mblevin@debian.org> writes:
> 
> > James Troup wrote:
> > > Mitch Blevins <mblevin@debian.org> writes:
> > > 
> > > > The $64K question is... is this okay?
> > > 
> > > No; see the fine packaging manual.  `build' is a required target for
> > > debian/rules (3.2.1) and if you omit, your package will be unbuildable
> > > with dpkg-buildpackage and as result will fail for all the non-i386
> > > ports and anyone who tries to build the package from source.
> > 
> > Thanks for the pointer.  I will put in an empty build target to satisfy
> > this.
> 
> No, the build target should be present and should do something,
> i.e. build the package.  Even if it only depends on the two other
> build targets, it should still build stuff.

Quoting from the fine packaging manual (3.2.1):
  For some packages, notably ones where the same source tree is
  compiled in different ways to produce two binary packages, the
  build target does not make much sense. For these packages it is
  good enough to provide two (or more) targets (build-a and build-b
  or whatever) for each of the ways of building the package, and a
  build target that does nothing.


It doesn't make sense to have the build target depend on build-a and
build-b because one of these builds would overwrite the other.
The only sane way to make the build target do something useful would
be for it to sequentially: build-a, install-a, build-b, install-b

Is the packaging manual wrong?

-Mitch