Re: Nitpicking: you are doing it wrong
On 08/07/11 22:23, Thomas Goirand wrote:
> On 07/08/2011 08:47 PM, Scott Howard wrote:
>> Right now, the general consensus is the dh and cdbs produce
>> debian packages that are easier to maintain in the long run (if the
>> sponsor has to take over maintenance of the package or if NMUs are
>> required in the future.)
> I really would like you to explain WHERE you saw such a consensus.
> When it goes down to myself, I would *not* sponsor a package that
> is using either dh or CDBS, because I like to be in the control and see
> what's going on. I believe that CDBS/dh is hiding what's necessary to
> do a good packaging, and is calling too many unnecessary helpers,
> which slows down the build process. Also, with dh_override_*, if you
> have a lot of them, it soon becomes unreadable. That's only my opinion
> though, but I suspect that I might not be the only one to think this way.
> In anyways, I don't see at all a consensus here!!!
Seeing what's going on is important for learning and for debugging.
Thankfully debugging with dh is pretty mature, should you happen to need
it (don't really know about cdbs), but having to read a non-dh-using
rules file to understand exactly what happens when and why can be a lot
of work and shouldn't be imposed on your fellow DDs if you don't have a
good reason for it (curiosity and a micro-management tendency are not
good reasons; funky non-standard build-systems are)
Please use dh/cdbs/whatever other means necessary to make your packaging
work easy to read and understand. Don't make the packaging more complex
for other people just because you want to "know what's going on". That
sounds awfully like NIH[0].
You never know who might have to NMU it, make QA uploads, etc and even
you yourself might find it pretty hard to remember why you did something
in this particular fashion, when it actually could just as well be done
in a more common way.
Not using these tools goes against your own advice here[1]: you're
making the life of other developers who have to look at your code harder
for no reason.
Or to put it more succinctly in your own words: "otherwise, you have no
rules at all and it's a mess".
And your performance argument seems like a dud unless you can provide
some evidence that you actually save a significant amount of time by not
using dh/cdbs/whatever during package builds (and by significant I mean
more than just a couple of seconds per build).
Cheers
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Invented_Here
[1] [🔎] 4E176B0D.8060100@debian.org">http://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/[🔎] 4E176B0D.8060100@debian.org
--
Leo "costela" Antunes
[insert a witty retort here]
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