[debhelper-devel] Bug#801732: debhelper: Auto detection of Maven and Gradle build systems

[Emmanuel Bourg]

Package: debhelper
Version: 9.20151005
Severity: wishlist

Dear Maintainer,

The maven-debian-helper package provides a build system class for Maven
projects, however the build files (pom.xml) are not detected automatically
by debhelper and the --buildsystem=maven parameter has to be set explicitly
in debian/rules.

Could be please modify debhelper such that Maven builds are detected
automatically? As I understand the @BUILDSYSTEMS array in Dh_Buildsystems.pm
declares the buildsystems supported, but simply adding "maven" to the
list doesn't work since the class is in an independent package. I came up
with a solution to make it work even if maven-debian-helper isn't
installed (feel free to rework it, I'm not a Perl expert) :

    our @BUILDSYSTEMS = (
            "autoconf",
            (! compat(7) ? "perl_build" : ()),
            "perl_makemaker",
            "makefile",
            "python_distutils",
            (compat(7) ? "perl_build" : ()),
            "cmake",
            "ant",
            "qmake",
            "qmake_qt4",
            ((-e '/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Debhelper/Buildsystem/maven.pm') ? "maven" : ()),
    );

Likewise, Gradle will soon be supported with the introduction of gradle-debian-helper
and extending debhelper to support it as well would be appreciated.

Thank you,

Emmanuel Bourg