On Wed, Sep 15, 1999 at 01:30:20PM +0300, Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho wrote: > > > > Joey Hess' debhelper scripts are a good API, maybe it would be > > > > good to standardize on them to some degree.
> > > No. > > > > I didn't say "make them THE standard" > What did you mean then? I think that as many packages as reasonably possible should migrate towards them. They work pretty well, but I don't believe in forcing them on people if they are really opposed. > > Currently, anarchy reigns within debian/rules, > > and it's a pain to work with. > > Can you be more specific? Lots of packages work quite differently. Postgresql, for example, has a nice rules file that works like a makefile should - it starts up where it left off. Recently, I've encountered a few that don't do this (not to pick on anyone, though). Gpm - runs configure every time. Xemacs21 - runs *autoconf* to generate other makefiles, which are then run. Apache - unpacks a bunch of tarballs of upstream stuff and patches, and proceeds to work on those. Basically, orig.tar.gz doesn't contain the pristine upstream sources, but a tarball of them. Do you seem what I mean? Each of these is doing something slightly different, and it is a bit frustrating not to see a bit more cohesiveness. Not that any of these things are *bad*, per se, just that there seem to be a lot of packages that do stuff like this. > > Do you have any constructive criticism, > My constructive criticism is that you have not given any good reason for > making everybody use debhelper. If you had, I might have considered > reiterating the well-known old arguments against this idea. And you > can still do it. I'm not just talking about debhelper, but about rules files in general. I think using debhelper is one part of this. > > or a better alternative? > Yes. Don't standardise on debhelper. Rather fix the specific > problems you might have by amending policy to require certain things > without locking everybody down to a particular helper package. > Right now your concerns are vague and I'm not at all sure your > proposed solution is a good solution. > Besides, this all belongs in -policy, not -devel. Policy is not the be all and end all of Debian - frankly, it doesn't interest me much. I am interested in finding a good technical solution to our problem, and those of you that are interested in policy can decide what you want to do about it. You are right, I've been a bit vague, but that's because it's not one specific bug. It's a general problem that manifests itself in different ways that are difficult to discuss on a general level. And yet, it's good to at least talk about it at this level so as to try and come up with a set of good guidelines to go by before going out and doing a package by package combing of Debian. Thanks, -- David N. Welton ( Circa mea pectora [EMAIL PROTECTED] ) multa sunt suspiria http://www.efn.org/~davidw ( de tua pulchritudine debian.org + prosa.it ) que me ledunt misere