Enrico Zini <enrico@debian.org> writes:
> Hello, and thank you for maintaining the Policy!
> Policy paragraph 4.9.1 has an example debian/rules which contains these
> lines:
> INSTALL_PROGRAM = $(INSTALL) -p -o root -g root -m 755
> ifeq (,$(filter nostrip,$(DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS)))
> INSTALL_PROGRAM += -s
> endif
> However, paragraph 10.1 recommends against it:
> It is not recommended to strip binaries by passing the "-s" flag to
> "install", because this fails to remove .comment and .note sections,
> and also prevents the automatic creation of dbgsym binary packages by
> tools like "dh_strip".
> I would personally prefer if the example built on debhelper. If the
> intention is to show what are the expectations at a lower level then
> I wish the example had a comment saying "This snippet serves to explain
> what are the expectations as a lower level. You usually want to use
> debhelper instead"
I looked at this snippet and I think it has worse problems than the use of
install -s. For example, it predates the existence of dpkg-buildflags,
which would also handle noopt. I'm also dubious that it serves any useful
purpose given that nearly every package should just use debhelper. The
typical current Debian packager seems more likely to be confused by this
fragment than aided by it.
I'm therefore going to propose fixing this bug with the following patch,
which is more aggressive than you propose.
I think this is informative rather than normative and therefore
technically doesn't require seconds, but I'll give this some time for
other people to take a look and talk me out of deleting this section if
they wish.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>