[Build-common-hackers] Bug#489430: Bug#489430: cdbs: debhelper usage

[Martin Koeppe]

On Sat, 12 Jul 2008, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 07, 2008 at 01:25:38PM +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
>> Am Samstag, 5. Juli 2008 schrieb Martin Koeppe:
>>> See package time 1.7-21 as example. Its rules says:
>>>
>>>    include /usr/share/cdbs/1/class/autotools.mk
>>>    include /usr/share/cdbs/1/rules/debhelper.mk
>>>
>>> i.e. debhelper.mk is included after autotools.mk. In this
>>> configuration buildcore.mk doesn't know that debhelper is to use and
>>> so doesn't use dh_testroot.
>>
>> It is documented that you should include debhelper.mk first.  If you
>> don't, things will degrade, albeit smoothly.  I don't know if there is
>> anything more we need to do about it.
>
> Conditionals (like ifdef) are evaluated earlier than functions (like
> $(if ) ).
>
> I have now committed a change to SVN to use only functions (not
> conditional) so the evaluation is done after file inclusion, and changed
> the variable from "simply expanded" (:=) to "recursively expanded" (=),
> to postpone resolving until actually used.
>
> This has the drawback of executing the command every time it is used
> rather than only once, but I consider that acceptable.

Thanks for changing that. It seems more intuitive that order of 
inclusion doesn't matter, just like with the standard C header files.

I could identify 4 packages with this issue so far:

- time 1.7-21
- libgd2 2.0.35.dfsg-3
- sqlite3 3.5.9-3
- tiff 3.8.2-8

I already thought about filing bugs against them, but now I wont do. 
:-)

Martin