Bug#660193: developers-reference: please suggest debian/rules target name for preparing source
* Julian Gilbey [2012-02-17 12:28 +0000]:
> On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 11:14:00AM +0100, Carsten Hey wrote:
> > 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.
>
> How would this relate to Policy 4.14 - debian/README.source?
In general, debian/README.source does not contain information how to
run, for example, autoconf and friends to convert a clean VCS checkout
into a source tree that can be built using dpkg-buildpackage (there are
packages that require this).
The section's first sentence reads:
| If running dpkg-source -x on a source package doesn't produce ...,
| creating a debian/README.source documentation file is recommended.
Mentioning such a target in debian/README.source seems to be a good
thing, but it does not match the current definition in the policy. If
this gets added to the developer's reference, suggesting to add an
according note to debian/README.source seems to be reasonable, despite
not perfectly fitting a definition in the policy. But if it ends up in
the policy (either in section "4.14 - debian/README.source" or section
"4.9 - debian/rules" and using the words "may" or "optional"), I assume
it would be hard to find a wording that justifies mentioning this target
in debian/README.source, but not explaining how to run autoconf manually
to be able to build the package.
The intention of this bug report is to unify the name of a target that
might be used more often soon, and it is not sufficient to reach this
goal if we rely on package maintainers to document the target they use
in debian/README.source.
I hope this answers your question (I'm not sure which relation you meant
exactly).
Regards
Carsten
Reply to: