Bug#430649: Please clarify splitting/syntax of DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Loïc Minier <lool@dooz.org> writes:

>  - separating with commas prevents passing options with commas; a sample
>    use case which might be useful in the near future could be passing
>    CFLAGS/LDFLAGS via DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS, and some of these flags require
>    commas to reach the linker/assembler/preprocessor (e.g. "-Wl,-O1")

I think this is a convincing reason to standardize on a space-separated
list, combined with the additional ease of parsing.

>  Note: there's an interesting issue in that CFLAGS or LDFLAGS are
>  typically space separated and hence we would need to define how to pass
>  multiple such flags in DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS...

Yeah, but so far there's no DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS tag for that, and I'm not
sure it would be a good idea, as opposed to a more generic optimization
level setting or the like.

>  It seems to me that the more separators we allow, the less room for
>  future expansion of DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS we keep and the more complex the
>  early parsing of DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS will be.

Agreed.

>  Additionally to the request to document the syntax and remove the
>  recommendation for "findstring", I also wish Policy would document how
>  to deal with a keyword being present multiple times.  For example:
>     DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS="noopt parallel=2 debug parallel=1"

Currently, this is only an issue for parallel, since there are no other
options that can contradict each other.  (There is no "debug" option.)  I
think it's easiest to just say to not do that.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>