Re: debian/rules: Moving to debhelper or cdbs
On Tue, May 17, 2005 at 11:35:56AM +1000, Ben Finney wrote:
> I'd like to submit patches for a couple of packages that currently use
> hand-rolled debian/rules files. Is the current best practise to use
> debhelper, or cdbs, or something else?
I don't think there's really consensus on it, but from personal
experience, I highly favour debhelper for reasons of least surprise:
- What's going on is mostly clear, it's in fact 'basicly' a library of
command snippets
- No makefile fu, easily debuggeable because there's a clear place to
put extra code at each step, and because of DH_VERBOSE. Flow of
control is easy when not having expert makefile fu in debian/rules,
and most people are no makefile experts
- No need to migrate away from cdbs at any time you need to do something
complicated not catered for in cdbs (in cdbs you require to have hooks
available for what you want, rather than that being automatically
available)
- Does not encourage evil things like build-time rewriting of
debian/control
- Much more mature, cdbs is still in high flux, and iirc a rewrite
(cdbs2) is planned or underway
- And last but not least, debhelper is used in much more packages than
cdbs, and greater familiarity exists amongst DD's and other
maintainers
This is my personal opinion, but real bugs are backed by this, like
the most recent one I encountered: #309367
--Jeroen
--
Jeroen van Wolffelaar
Jeroen@wolffelaar.nl (also for Jabber & MSN; ICQ: 33944357)
http://Jeroen.A-Eskwadraat.nl
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