On Fri, Jun 13, 2003 at 01:40:34AM -0400, Colin Walters wrote: > I don't quite understand the point of having the 'build' target be > mandatory.
dpkg-buildpackage requires it. You'd have to make it fail gracefully if the build target wasn't there, and probably get this into a stable release in order not to royally confuse users trying to build packages on stable. I'm not convinced this is a good idea, though; AIUI there are still architectures that have trouble with fakeroot (at least there are still build daemons that use sudo to gain root). Also, I find 'debian/rules build' a useful finger macro for when I just want to debug something small in a package and don't want to build the actual binary package (perhaps I'm on a system where I don't have root access to install the package anyway). I would be very disappointed if this no longer worked consistently. > My problem with it is precisely what policy says: > > > For some packages, notably ones where the same source tree is > > compiled in different ways to produce two binary packages, the > > `build' target does not make much sense. This confuses me. The build target makes perfect sense here; it just builds two temporary trees. With appropriate use of VPATH in the build system this is quite easy. > The reason I bring this up is I am designing a new Debian build system, > and it's hard for me to know what to do with it exactly. Please include the build target. It's useful for users as well. -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
