Package: debian-policy
Severity: wishlist
OK, I'm sick of this.
There are a number of dbs-style packages out there, that don't give you
the source if you say "dpkg-source -x .dsc"; instead, they give you a
directory with a source tarball and a bunch of patches. While this is
probably a good idea to make maintaining said packages easier, the fact
that they all have different debian/rules targets for unpacking sucks
majorly; if you want to apply a small local patch, you have three
options to find out what the right targets are:
* Guess (which is hardly successful, IME)
* Call one of the more common debian/rules targets, such as "configure"
or "build", and interrupt it when it starts doing stuff you don't
actually need.
* Read makefile sources. Usually, this involves tracking where a given
variable is given a value, by searching a number of included
makefiles. While not impossible or hard, it's very annoying that this
has to be done in the first place, and a waste of time IMHO.
Wouldn't it be a good idea to add two targets to the debian/rules file,
say, "unpacked" and "patched" or something[1], which would unpack the
source, resp. patch it using the provided patches? These targets would
be mandatory if an unpacked source package would not provide an unpacked
source tree, and optional otherwise.
Comments?
[1] I don't care what the actual names of the targets would be, and it'd
probably be a good idea to use names which are actually in use in
some actual implementations; but I'd like to see this in policy, to
avoid this mess in the future.
--
EARTH
smog | bricks
AIR -- mud -- FIRE
soda water | tequila
WATER
-- with thanks to fortune
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