[debhelper-devel] Bug#873043: debhelper: Please mv Debian lib/Debian for case-insensitive filesystems

[Geoffrey Thomas]

Package: debhelper
Version: 10.7.2
Tags: patch
Severity: wishlist

Hi Debhelper maintainers,

I would sort of like to use Debhelper to build Debian packages on macOS, 
as an alternative to homebrew etc. The general process of bootstrapping 
Debian on macOS takes a lot of steps, but one of the sillier steps is 
creating a case-sensitive disk image, because Debhelper ships both a 
debian/ and Debian/ directory. The default macOS root filesystem is 
case-preserving but not case-sensitive, so extracting a tarball containing 
debian/ and Debian/ will cause one directory to clobber the other.

I have a commit at
    https://gitlab.com/geofft/debhelper
which does a `git mv Debian lib/Debian` (removing the existing lib -> . 
symlink), plus a few fixes to point things at the Debian subdirectory. 
I've tested that the resulting binary packages are identical to the one in 
unstable, other than the changed path in debian/copyright (and the lack of 
doc/SMARTER-BUILDSYSTEMS, which seems not to have been committed to git). 
I've also confirmed that `prove -vwlr t`, as mentioned in the commit 
introducing the lib symlink, continues to pass. For review, you probably 
want to use `git show -M` on my patch to recognize the renames.

Can you please consider applying this patch? Thanks!

-- 
Geoffrey Thomas
https://ldpreload.com
geofft at ldpreload.com