[Build-common-hackers] Ideas for the future of cdbs

[Jonas Smedegaard]

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On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 11:00:05AM +0200, Marc Dequènes (Duck) wrote:
> Coin,
>
> Quoting Peter Eisentraut <petere at debian.org>:
>
>> * Require debhelper 7 and rely on its defaults.
>
> Interresting, but i guess this is too early as it would render 
> backports more difficult. Perhaps postpone this goal after the Squeeze 
> release would be better.

If anyone is up for such challenge, we could _optionally_ do it now, 
i.e. when e.g. DEB_DH is non-empty then (and only then!) rely on DH7 
defaults.

Then in CDBS v2 we can switch to that behaviour by default, and drop old 
behaviour to simplify our code.


>> * Autodetection of rules and classes
>>
>> For the most part, we can detect the rules and classes needed 
>> automatically, e.g., if you find a configure file, then use 
>> autotools. And everyone uses debhelper anyway, so we could make that 
>> the default.  So I imagine that most users would just have to write
>
> I agree debhelper should be enforced, as most of the CDBS power is 
> activated when used, and it seems the step is already partly done (the 
> Python class no more check if the debhelper rules were included before 
> using dh_python as in the initial code).

If that is the case then it is an error: The intent (and, I believe, how 
it actually works) is for dh_python to be invoked from a rule that is 
only triggered when debhelper.mk is included.

Does it make sense what I am saying above?  Do you still believe that 
current code partly enforces debhelper?

I really feel that CDBS should not depend on debhelper.


> The autodetection rule seems a bit dangerous, and one should be able 
> to deactivate them if the build system is weird and requires special 
> treatment.

I feel that we cannot sanely support debhelper autodetection at all: It 
will clash with other of our snippets, and AFAICT without us being able 
to detect it to disable our routines.

It really seems that debhelper autodetection is an alternative to CDBS 
(and currently a simpler one, but also a poorer one).  Classic debhelper 
OTOH (including non-automatic DH7) seems to work nicely together with 
CDBS.


  - jonas

- -- 
* Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt
* Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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