[debhelper-devel] Bug#868204: dh_installdocs tries to install README.Debian even if it already exists (regression)

[Niels Thykier]

Control: found -1 10.5

On Thu, 13 Jul 2017 05:25:33 +0200 =?utf-8?q?St=C3=A9phane_Glondu?=
<glondu at debian.org> wrote:
> Package: debhelper
> Version: 10.6.3
> Severity: serious
> 
> Hello,
> 
> At the moment, ocaml FTBFS in unstable. I think this is because of
> debhelper. Indeed, the error message is:
> 
> > [...]
> > dh_install: ./debian/ld.conf overwrites debian/tmp/usr/lib/ocaml/ld.conf (both installed as: /usr/lib/ocaml/ld.conf)
> >    dh_installdocs
> > dh_installdocs: copy(debian/README.Debian, debian/ocaml-nox/usr/share/doc/ocaml-nox/README.Debian): No such file or directory
> > debian/rules:81: recipe for target 'binary' failed
> > make: *** [binary] Error 2
> 
> Here, debian/ocaml-nox/usr/share/doc/ocaml-nox/README.Debian exists
> already and dh_ocamldoc should not try to overwrite it.
> 
> Note that debian/ocaml-nox/usr/share/doc/ocaml-nox/README.Debian at
> this moment of the build is a dangling symbolic link, but that
> shouldn't matter.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> -- 
> Stéphane
> 
> [...]

Hi Stéphane,

Thanks for the report.

I have applied a patch to debhelper to restore the original behaviour,
which was to replace the dangling symlink.  As I understand you that was
not what you had hoped, but it is what I have to do to fix this
regression (otherwise other people may still be surprised).

If you don't want to have dh_installdocs to touch that file, then you
should use either:

 * --exclude usr/share/doc/ocaml-nox/README.Debian
   => Make dh_installdocs stop trying to install anything there.

 * --ignore debian/README.Debian
   => Make dh_installdocs pretend that debian/README.Debian does not
      exists.

(Untested, from finger memory)

I would recommend using --ignore for this case because it appears to be
trivially applicable plus I hope to optimize dh_installdocs eventually
and my current optimization methods are disabled with --exclude.

Thanks,
~Niels