[debhelper-devel] Patch

[Niels Thykier]

Paul R. Tagliamonte:
> Hey all,
> 
> Please keep me on CC, I'm not subscribed
> 
> Just bumping this to the development list too. The patch seems to work
> fine here. Can someone provide some review or consider merging it?
> 
> Thanks!
>   Paul
> 
> On Tue, Dec 12, 2017 at 11:39 PM, Paul R. Tagliamonte <paultag at gmail.com> wrote:
>> tags 570935 + patch
>> thanks
>>
>> Patch adding a DH_WITH environment var attached.
>>
>> --
>> :wq
> 
> 
> 

Hi Paul,

Thanks for looking at improving debhelper.

I have been looking at this, and I am left with a concern and one piece
of "bike-shedding".

The situation:
==============
dh add-ons are order sensitive.  That is, there are cases where "--with
a,b" vs. "--with b,a" behaves different (the only know example was the
autotools-dev and autoreconf add-ons, where you always wanted --with
autotools-dev,autoreconf - in that order).

This is a nasty misfeature.  Unfortunately, it is a design flaw and
cannot be trivially fixed without rewriting the entire dh add-on system.

The concern:
============

A package maintainer can trivially shuffle the order of two add-ons, but
the builder does not have this option.  With the above mentioned
"misfeature", I foresee that eventually someone will need to place an
add-on in a different order than this patch allows (e.g. so they can
inject theirs in the middle of two add-ons enabled by the package
maintainer).

I think the best solution here is for someone (probably me) to sit down
and redesign the add-on system to avoid/fix the above misfeature.  I
suppose this can be done later if that ever becomes relevant (with this
mail just serving to record the issue to cluebat myself if/when that
becomes relevant).

The bike-shedding:
==================

I would prefer that the name of the variable(s) uses "add-on" / "ADDON"
(e.g. DH_EXTRA_ADDONS) instead of WITH (DH_WITH).  What it controls is
which adds you enable - "WITH" says nothing about what it does (I
appreciate it is a reference to the command line option, but I think an
"ADDONS"-based name will be less confusing to newcomers/people with
less/no debhelper experience).

Thanks,
~Niels