Re: Using dh for debian-policy packaging
Hi!
On Mon, 2017-05-29 at 14:23:26 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:
> > I therefore intend to:
>
> > - Move all the formatting build machinery into the top-level Makefile.
> > - Convert the packaging to dh with a minimal debian/rules file.
> > - Move the doc-base registration files into debian with *.doc-base names.
>
> > My guess is that nearly no one will care, but if I'm missing some reason
> > not to do this, please let me know.
> This is now done. I also got rid of a ton of legacy cruft in the build
> system left over from previous ways of building the package, and fixed a
> bunch of other minor bugs in the process.
Great! This is something that also annoyed me while doing the changes
for the DocBook conversion, but ended up only refactoring the minimum
necessary to get through. The entanglement of upstream rules in
debian/rules sourced from the top dir Makefile was a bit perplexing. :)
> XML validation is now applied to the debconf specification and copyright
> format (they were previously skipped by being in subdirectories, and the
> debconf specification actually failed validation, now fixed). The
> publication date for all documents is now derived from debian/changelog,
> so should be more reproducible. And debhelper is now responsible for
> doing all the gzip compression and getting the flags correct for build
> reproducibility.
Yeah, I think I considered adding validation for those too, but didn't
want to make the changes pile up much more. O:)
> There's still a bit of irritating duplication of build rules between the
> top-level Makefile and the docbook.mk include file that I didn't
> eliminate.
Same here, this also annoyed me a bit, but given the differences
between the generators, I opted to have at least two sets of rules
instead of one per directory. So unifying everything would be indeed
nice.
> I'm not a fan of recursive make, so I'm somewhat inclined to
> fix this by just getting rid of the nested Makefiles and building
> everything from the top level.
I can see advantages in both, but only as long as recursive make does
not add duplication. But in this case this might be the way to go. Or
perhaps move the subdocuments into the root dir?
Another annoyance was the document specific version files. I think it
would be nice to have just one common version.xml and one version.txt.
Something else that might be worth considering is switching the
debconf inclusions via ENTITY into proper XInclude's, like I did with
the upgrading checklist. I think these would make the markup more
clear.
Thanks,
Guillem
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