Control: tags -1 wontfix
Jonas Smedegaard:
> Package: debhelper
> Version: 13.3.1
> Severity: important
>
> Hi,
>
> Newly released package liblmdb-file-perl has an odd build script which
> refuses to build on i386 platform: it checks and then calls "exit 0" -
> its Makefile.PL contains this:
>
> if($Config{archname} =~ /686/) {
> warn "liblmdb isn't supported in your platform, sorry.\n";
> exit 0;
> }
>
>
> To my surprise, debhelper does not fail, but silently continues to build
> an empty package:
> https://buildd.debian.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=liblmdb-file-perl&arch=i386&ver=0.12-3&stamp=1609092696&raw=0
>
> Seems to me this is a bug in debhelper - possibly even more severe than
> "important".
>
>
> - Jonas
>
>
Hi Jonas,
Thanks for the report.
AFAICT, upstream ought to have exit'ed with a non-zero exit code here
because the configure job have in fact failed (albeit deliberate) to
prepare the next stage of the build.
I do not see a reliable way for debhelper to second-guess the exit code
from upstream's build system (a lot of build systems emit warnings to
standard error without any issues in the built artefact).
>From my PoV, I see this as bug in the upstream package and unactionable
feature request in debhelper.
If anything, it might have been noticed if dh_auto_install always
installed to d/tmp and you were required to always have something in
your d/<pkg>.install (because then dh_install would have noticed that
something was wrong). I have been considering this as a new default in
a future compat level for other reasons.
~Niels
