[debhelper-devel] Bug#816332: debhelper: dh_installdirs should operate on both debian/tmp and debian/$package

[Robert Luberda]

Package: debhelper
Version: 9.20160115
Severity: wishlist

By default dh_installdirs creates directories in debian/$package. However
in multi-binary packages files are usually first installed into
debian/tmp. Creating the directories elsewhere seems to have limited
usability, as such directories won't be used by upstream makefiles anyway.

This is a long standing bug, I've already work-arounded in two of my
packages:
http://sources.debian.net/src/man2html/1.6g-8/debian/rules/?hl=35#L32
http://sources.debian.net/src/afterstep/2.2.12-6/debian/rules/?hl=169#L165a
and now I'm thinking about doing the same for yet another package,
because its upstream checks for existance of some directory before
installing files into it.

Simllar code can be found in another package:
http://sources.debian.net/src/isdnutils/1:3.25%2Bdfsg1-3.7/debian/rules/?hl=43#L43

I can find cases where installing into debian/$package can be intended action 
(e.g. providing empty /var/cache/something in the binary package), and I 
guess some packages might depend on this behaviour, so this bug should
be fixed in some backward-compatible way: 
 - maybe by installing in both debian/$package and debian/tmp, 
 - or by providing a new command line option, 
 - or by making `dh_installdocs -Pdebian/tmp -A' work.

Regards,
robert

-- System Information:
Debian Release: stretch/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (990, 'unstable'), (200, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 4.4.0-1-686-pae (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=pl_PL.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=pl_PL.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: sysvinit (via /sbin/init)

Versions of packages debhelper depends on:
ii  autotools-dev            20150820.1
ii  binutils                 2.26-5
ii  dh-strip-nondeterminism  0.016-1
ii  dpkg                     1.18.4
ii  dpkg-dev                 1.18.4
ii  file                     1:5.25-2
ii  libdpkg-perl             1.18.4
ii  man-db                   2.7.5-1
ii  perl                     5.22.1-7
ii  po-debconf               1.0.19

debhelper recommends no packages.

Versions of packages debhelper suggests:
ii  dh-make  2.201605

-- no debconf information