On Fri, 2003-06-13 at 03:57, Colin Watson wrote: > 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.
Sure. > Also, I find 'debian/rules build' a useful finger macro I agree, it's a useful target, but that's not what we're discussing. > 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. There are a lot of broken upstream build systems which won't work under VPATH builds. Hell, I even mess it up occasionally even using Automake because I always forget to run 'make distcheck'. My point is that the current situation where 'build' is required but it may do nothing is a bit silly. But the more I think about it, while it's silly, packages which do nothing in 'build' are rare, and we should work to make them extinct :) By keeping 'build' required we're encouraging them to do so. So I guess I'm ok with the current situation.
