Bug#930666: Please document consensus on use of dh sequencer
Bill Allombert <ballombe@debian.org> writes:
> On Tue, Jun 18, 2019 at 06:24:45PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> The following targets are required and must be implemented by
>> ``debian/rules``: ``clean``, ``binary``, ``binary-arch``,
>> -``binary-indep``, ``build``, ``build-arch`` and ``build-indep``. These
>> -are the targets called by ``dpkg-buildpackage``.
>> +``binary-indep``, ``build``, ``build-arch`` and ``build-indep``. (When
>> +using ``dh``, these are implemented using the wildcard pattern shown
>> +above.) These are the targets called by ``dpkg-buildpackage``.
> Hello Russ,
> I find this layering violation rather confusing especially if dh should
> be seen as the rule and not the exception.
> There are maybe an hundred places where we could mention dh,
> with statement like "when using dh, do something else".
I think there are fewer of them than you might think (I had that
impression too going in, but found that there were a lot fewer than I had
expected), but I also think that making those changes going forward will
be valuable. We've already started doing that with debhelper, largely in
footnotes, and having a more systematic way of structuring that would be
useful. I think this may be usefully expressed in metadata: some way to
flag a section of Policy with "debhelper does this for you" (since in most
cases it doesn't matter if you're using debhelper directly or via dh).
That said, this is way too large of a problem to solve in this bug. I
think we need to stay focused on one section of policy here with a few
tactical fixes so that the text still reads cleanly and not confusingly
(which is the goal above), and then look at what we can do elsewhere to
spread the clarity once we've agreed on what we want to say here.
> Maybe what we need is a separate 'dh packaging manual' where packaging
> is explained from dh point of view.
That already exists, I think? That's the debhelper documentation.
Another option would be to leave out the minimal debian/rules example
entirely and just refer entirely to the dh manual. Maybe that's better.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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