[debhelper-devel] Bug#570935: Patch

[Paul R. Tagliamonte]

On Thu, Dec 28, 2017 at 5:11 AM, Niels Thykier <niels at thykier.net> wrote:
> Hi Paul,
>
> Thanks for looking at improving debhelper.

Of course!

> 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).


Yeah, that's a nasty one. I added a warning in the docs for folks to not
use this envvar if at all possible, so hopefully this prevents this
from causing that situation to become more complex.

> 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).

I hated the name DH_WITH, so great name, updated patch attached! I
built and tested the new patch, and it still appears to work!

> Thanks,
> ~Niels
>

Thanks, Niels,
  Paul



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