Package: dpkg-dev
Version: 1.18.24
Severity: wishlist
Dear Maintainer,
I'm trying to run a build of Debian's vim package, but limiting it to a couple
of variants, to reduce the build time. The debian/rules file allows you to set
the VARIANT variable on the commandline to the variants you want, but
communicating a variable with a value containing a space to the makefile via
dpkg-buildpackage isn't possible, as far as I can tell.
What does work is
dpkg-buildpackage -b --no-sign -R"debian/rules VARIANT=vim-nox"
Though perhaps I'm abusing the -R option here a bit, as there's no explicit way
to pass non-target arguments to dpkg-buildpackage (and perhaps that's the real
request here).
What does not work is
dpkg-buildpackage -b --no-sign -R"debian/rules VARIANT='vim-nox vim-tiny'"
It complains that there's no "vim-tiny'" target.
The output from the program shows what I'd expect:
debian/rules VARIANT='vim-nox vim-tiny' clean
but an exerpt from strace shows why it's not working:
execve("debian/rules", ["debian/rules", "VARIANT='vim-nox", "vim-tiny'",
"clean"], [/* 48 vars */]) = 0
Because dpkg-buildpackage is doing a simple whitespace split on the value passed
to -R, instead of a more sophisticated, shell-oriented parsing, there's
basically no way of passing this variable on in this fashion.
I see that there's a Text::ParseWords::shell::shellwords function that seems
like it might be an appropriate tool for this, but perhaps as I suggested above,
what's really needed here is a way to pass other arguments to the execution of
rules.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 9.4
APT prefers stable-updates
APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-6-amd64 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8),
LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
Versions of packages dpkg-dev depends on:
ii binutils 2.28-5
ii bzip2 1.0.6-8.1
ii libdpkg-perl 1.18.24
ii make 4.1-9.1
ii patch 2.7.5-1+b2
ii perl 5.24.1-3+deb9u4
ii tar 1.29b-1.1
ii xz-utils 5.2.2-1.2+b1
Versions of packages dpkg-dev recommends:
ii build-essential 12.3
ii clang-3.8 [c-compiler] 1:3.8.1-24
ii fakeroot 1.21-3.1
ii gcc [c-compiler] 4:6.3.0-4
ii gcc-6 [c-compiler] 6.3.0-18+deb9u1
ii gnupg 2.1.18-8~deb9u2
ii gnupg2 2.1.18-8~deb9u2
ii gpgv 2.1.18-8~deb9u2
ii libalgorithm-merge-perl 0.08-3
Versions of packages dpkg-dev suggests:
pn debian-keyring <none>
-- no debconf information
