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Re: Opinions on CDBS amongst sponsors



On Monday 11 December 2006 11:25, Neil Williams wrote:
> What are the problems with CDBS (apart from debian/control automation)?

Generally I am not a fan of layers of abstraction once the abstraction is 
too abstract. Frameworks are great as long as they do what you expect. But 
if they fail to do what you expect you are boned. Frameworks may even be 
buggy which means you totally depend on the person who created the 
framework.

CDBS for me means:

- documented mainly by its source (that - since it's just makefiles -
  looks even worth than some of my early Perl projects)
- brute-force approach by calling everything that starts with dh_
- not simple any more once you try to do non-standard things

Some package maintainers may think the default debian/rules file created by 
dh-make is uncomfortable. And I admit that using debhelper makes writing 
the same prayer into debian/rules time and again. But at least I 
understand which steps are done when calling the different stages of 
debian/install manually. And sometimes I even dear that package 
maintainers using CDBS don't even care about what happens exactly.

IMHO debhelper (dh_*) is the right abstraction layer. I already looked at 
packages where everything was done using basic shell commands. That's not 
very clear to the reader either and too low-level for common use.

When sponsoring packages I claim to understand how the package is built to 
spot major mistakes. With CDBS I can just insert a coin and hope for the 
best. It just leaves me with a "let's hope this one builds on the buildds, 
too".

Kindly
 Christoph
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