[Build-common-hackers] Bug#652945: Atrocious interactions between CDBS, libtool and source format 3.0 (quilt)

[Steve McIntyre]

Package: cdbs
Version: 0.4.100
Severity: grave
Justification: zero documentation, wasting hours of development time, causing many bugs

I've just wasted multiple hours trying to fix up the mess in an NMU
(#652369). That bug itself isn't necessarily caused by CDBS itself,
but a lot of the time I've spent trying to fix it definitely is. I've
just had to update the dvbstreamer package's local copy of libtool to
make it build binaries in a current unstable chroot. After fighting
through the CDBS code to decipher how to do that (yay for total lack
of documentation!), I've found DEB_AUTO_UPDATE_LIBTOOL that seems to
do what I need. Unfortunately, it doesn't take copies of any of the
existing upstream files to be able to put them back during a
"debian/rules clean" run. That means that dpkg-source v3 (quilt)
bitches and refuses to run again once I've done a build due to
uncommitted changes. Hence, I can't tweak things and re-run
dpkg-buildpackage/debuild while debugging things (as already
complained about elsewhere this week).

I've looked in vain for any way to make this work, but cannot find
one. Therefore, I'm about to upload my new NMU with working packages
but (as far as I'm concerned) a buggy build system that will reliably
fail to build twice in a row. If this wasn't an NMU and therefore I
wasn't trying to keep changes minimal, I would be fixing the package
more deeply by repackaging it without CDBS.

Please remove this under-documented and badly-designed rubbish from
the archive. It's been responsible for bad maintainer behaviour and
lots of RC bugs in the past, and I can see this happening again and
again in future.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968) (ignored: LC_ALL set to C)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

cdbs depends on no packages.

Versions of packages cdbs recommends:
ii  autotools-dev  20110511.1

Versions of packages cdbs suggests:
ii  devscripts  2.11.2

-- no debconf information