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Re: The Helper Rant



On Fri, Oct 12, 2001 at 06:43:08PM +0200, Gergely Nagy wrote:
> 
> As some may know, I ask my applicants to do a package without
> debhelper, so I can be sure, that they know what goes on behind the
> scenes. There were cases where the first tries weren't good. In fact,
> they were bad. And that made me wonder..

IMHO you are expecting too much from your applicants.  The description
of the T+S check (from http://www.debian.org/devel/join/nm-step4) says

  The applicant must provide assurance that
  they can, in fact, do the job for which they have volunteered.  

I think that using debehelper for building a package is absolutely
acceptable, since this is what most of us do when building our
packages. Frankly, I'm not sure whether I would have passed at the
time of my own application the T+S check by the criteria you propose.

On the other hand I agree with you that an appplicant should give prove
of skills which are more advanced than just filling in some dh_make
template. If I think that an applicant has shown a package that is
too simple I ask him too show me something more involved.

> The other common thing I see in debian/rules, is that the dh_make
> comments (like `# We have nothing to do by default.'), which are
> unnecessary, and probably only there for the maintainer to see what he
> should put there, and what that particular target is used for. Then,
> there are the commented-out debhelper commands. Why are they there, if
> they're not used? They just make the diff larger, and serve no other
> purpose.

I don't think that the increase of filesize is a problem here. It seems
rather to be a question of elegance and purity. Then one should admit
that people may have different ideas of what is elegant.

What I do is checking whether the rules file of my applicant contains
unnecessary invocations of debhelper commands, and if yes ask them to
go themselves trough the list and tell me which ones are needed and
which ones are not.

-Ralf.
-- 

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