[Pkg-octave-devel] Improvements for octave-pkg-dev [was: Re: Regarding octave-interval packaging]

[Rafael Laboissière]

* Oliver Heimlich <oheim at posteo.de> [2016-04-24 22:39]:
>
> I finished my other tasks that I wanted to do. There have been some 
> observations about how we could improve octave-pkg.mk:
>
> - The NEWS file gets packaged twice. First it gets installed in 
> Octave's packinfo dir. Second, it gets compressed into usr/share/doc. I 
> fixed it in octave-interval by setting a dh-variable and using a 
> symlink that points to packinfo/NEWS.

This might be implemented in octave-pkg.mk.

> - the remove-dirs target should have a double-colon rule, cf. clean. I 
> want to extend it's behaviour and had to duplicate the rule.

Should we make all internal rules defined in octave-pkg.mk double colon? 
They are:

        check-version
        create-dirs
        install-pkg
        clean-files
        install-docs
        check-pkg
        remove-dirs

> - we should parse the upstream DESCRIPTION and provide the description 
> text in a substvar. This way we don't have to repeat ourselves. See 
> octave-interval's d/rules how to do it.

Your technique using the ${source:Uptream-Description} is interesting and 
it may be a good idea to implement it in octave-pkg-dev, more 
specifically in the octave-pkg-helper or in another one similar.  This is 
a Perl script and has provisions for creating and adding substitution 
variables.  I will take a look at this.

At any rate, I tried to built octave-interval from Git HEAD in a clean 
chroot and the substvar ${source:Uptream-Description} was not create, for 
unknown reasons.

> - the install-docs rule in octave-pkg.mk should not call 
> dh_installdocs. The latter will already be called during the 
> binary-install phase and calling it twice is not necessary.

This sounds correct.  I will take a closer look on this.

Rafael