Bug#660193: developers-reference: please suggest debian/rules target name for preparing source

[Carsten Hey <carsten@debian.org>]

Package: developers-reference
Severity: wishlist

Maintainers might decide to add a special make target to prepare the
source tree for building, i.e., that make target is run by the
maintainer after a VCS checkout and possibly before releasing new
versions.  Possible reasons for this include reducing build dependencies
and ensuring that specific files are equal on different architectures.
Due to multi-arch, implementing such a target becomes more interesting.
Although I do not expect this to be used widely, I think the developers
reference should suggest a name for this target to archive consistency.

The package debianutils already uses such a target and uses 'prebuild'
as name.  The developers reference could adopt this name.

I'm not sure if it should be added as "6.1.4. Additional make targets in
debian/rules" or be incorporated into "6.7.5. Architecture-independent
data" (since the other mentioned use case, reducing build dependencies,
is primarily interesting for essential packages).  The "proper
dependency" part in the quote below could be addressed too.


* Russ Allbery [2012-02-17 00:48 -0800]:
> Carsten Hey <carsten@debian.org> writes:
> > debianutils uses a special make target 'prebuild' in debian/rules to
> > update build system related files and PO files before the actual source
> > package is built.
>
> > This basic idea also could be used to build problematic documentation
> > files on the maintainers computer before he/she builds the package.  The
> > other targets would then install the prebuilt documentation into the
> > package without the need to build it first.  A proper dependency on
> > debian/$prebuilt_doc could ensure that maintainers do not forget to run
> > debian/rules prebuild.
>
> > If maintainers choose to use such a target, suggesting a common name for
> > it in the developers reference could be reasonable.
>
> That's an interesting idea.  That's very similar to what I already do as
> upstream (I build POD-generated man pages from my autogen script, and in
> Debian packaging don't bother to regenerate them).