[Monotone-devel] Re: [Monotone-debian] Over-complicated debian/rules

[Stephen Leake]

Zack Weinberg <address@hidden> writes:

> On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 6:10 PM, Stephen Leake
> <address@hidden> wrote:
>>>  Note in particular that 'dh', AFAIK, still does
>>> not support the hacks that are necessary to prevent the manual from
>>> getting built on the buildds (which in turn is what keeps monotone
>>> transitions from getting entangled with TeXLive transitions, so we
>>> *really* do not want to lose that).
>>
>> I don't follow. Why doesn't the manual build with current Debian
>> Squeeze? It builds when I try it on my Debian Squeeze
>
> The manual builds fine on a normal installation of Squeeze, yah.
>
> It is, however, necessary to *prevent* the manual from being built
> (and then thrown away) by Debian's buildd network when it rebuilds the
> "monotone" package for all architectures.  Not because it wouldn't
> work, but because to do so the source package would have to express a
> Build-Depends (not to be confused with a Build-Depends-Indep) on TeX,
> and that in turn would mean that during periods where TeX didn't work
> correctly on some architectures, monotone could not transition to
> testing, despite there being nothing wrong with monotone itself.

I understand.

Personally, I would keep the dependence on TeX, and complain loudly
every time it causes a problem, in an effort to bring about the correct
solution you describe below. But that's a choice of long-term strategy,
and you seem to be more familiar with how to get things done in Debian
than I am.

Let's at least put comments in 'debian/rules' that explain the problem
and the chosen solution.

> 
> Hence the existing kludges in debian/rules to build the manual in the
> binary-indep target and *not* in the build target; which dh does not
> support AFAIK.
>
> Yes, this situation is broken.  The cure is for Debian Policy to
> mandate the "build-indep" and "build-arch" debian/rules targets so
> that dpkg-buildpackage -B could call build-arch instead of build; once
> that happened, dh would no doubt grow support for
> build-arch/build-indep in short order.  However, for no comprehensible
> reason, the Debian Policy maintainers have repeatedly refused to make
> build-arch mandatory; instead they want a mechanism to reliably
> *detect* whether there is a build-arch target.  As this is impossible
> (it may in fact reduce to the Halting Problem, but at the very least
> it would require modifications to Make that AFAIK nobody has even
> attempted to code) we're stuck.  For at least six years now, probably
> more like ten.
>
> z "no, I'm not bitter in the least, why would you think any such thing?" w
>

-- 
-- Stephe