Re: CDBS and debian/control ...
On Fri, Nov 18, 2005 at 10:11:41AM +0100, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 18, 2005 at 09:39:34AM +0100, Sven Luther wrote:
> > The problem that Jeffries had, and which you probably have also in your
> > CDBS based packages, is that you cannot use a debian/control target, as it will
> > be called automatically by the CDBS rules at *build time*, which is a RC bug
> > in CDBS i believe, and the reason why Joerg rejected the facile package, and
> > probably why you (by luck and without noticing probably) are not using a
> > debian/control target but an ocaml_init one.
>
> Not by luck, by choice. Makefile have been designed having in mind that
> targets correspond to files on the filesystem. Each time you use such a
> target you have be ready that make can decide to rebuild them. The fact
> that that does not happen in your debian/rules since no one reference
> the debian/control target is IMO a property not to rely on since in the
> future someone may forget that such a property is required to avoid mess
> at build time.
Given that this is something which *should* not be done, accordying to Joerg
and others, i think we can rely on on this behavior, and CDBS is clearly buggy
in this respect. The way linux-2.6 kernel did this, is to have the
debian/control target artificially fail to discover such problems, by
outputing a message and exiting 1.
> For that reason I chosed "ocamlinit" as a PHONY target (not a real PHONY
> target for make but used that way since there is no "ocamlinit" file on
> the filesystem generated by its rule).
Yeah, well.
> > So, if we will write in our policy that you should use a
> > debian/control target to generate the build-dep part of the control
> > file, then you cannot use CDBS at the same time, until CDBS is fixed.
>
> There's nothing to be fixed in CDBS, it works that way and Steffen
> simply badly interacted with it.
Nope, it should not even be trying to regenerate the debian/control file,
since this is forbidden by policy, so the bug would be serious, with tag
mentioning the policy entry concerninng non-automated debian/control
generation.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
Reply to: