Re: Nitpicking: you are doing it wrong
On 07/09/2011 05:14 AM, Gergely Nagy wrote:
> I believe that when someone knows the underlying system, using helpers
> is the way to go, because it makes not only your task easier, it also
> makes it easier for others to understand the packaging.
>
We were talking about mentoring, and you are talking about someone "who
knows the underlying system", and we should generalize and push them to
use dh because of that. Isn't there is something wrong here?
> NMUing something with a complex, home-built debian/rules is a pain in
> the backside at best.
>
Come on! It's not. Most debian/rules using debhelper (and not CDBS or dh)
looks nearly the same, with very little tweaks.
> And yes, one does sacrifice a lot of control on the altar of
> convenience. But I don't see that as a problem, there's nothing wrong
> with convenience. And while useless helper scripts add to the build
> time, that load is negligible.
>
> Even on the slowest machine I could get my hands on (emulated armel,
> with ~256Mb memory, running on an dual-core amd64 host, along with 4
> other VMs), the difference between using dh $@ and explicit dh_*
> commands on an average package was about 3 seconds. Completely getting
> rid of debhelper and doing everything by hand made it 2 more seconds
> faster.
>
> I don't know about you, but for 5 seconds, I'm not going to give up
> convenience.
>
It really depends. If the package is really small, and if it takes 6
seconds in total
to build, then skipping 5 seconds is a win. If it takes anyway 2
minutes, then
yes, I don't care about 5 seconds.
> Then again, the beauty of Debian is that people are allowed to tailor
> their packaging to their own liking (as long as it conforms to
> policy... sadly a debian/rules written in SHOOP does not). There's
> arguments for and against both helper-using and helper-less packaging,
> neither is a silver bullet.
>
My point to give arguments about not using dh was *not* to start a troll
thread about what is best practices. It was simply to tell that there
are some
arguments for and against using dh, and as a consequence, I found very bad
to write in this list that not using dh was a bad idea. People like
different
things, and using a helper like dh or CDBS should *not* be a requirement
written in this list. For this, Jakub is 100% right. At best, this would
be a
sponsor requirement (and for sure, it wont be mine, which is only to not
use CDBS which I don't understand).
So don't take me wrong. I'm not vouching *against* dh, in some cases I agree
it might be convenient, but just not always, and at the end, it's more a
mater
of preferences.
Thomas Goirand (zigo)
Reply to: