Package: debian-policy Severity: wishlist Section 4.9 of http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-source.html states that there a number of required targets for debian/rules. Specifically:
"This file must be an executable makefile, and contains the package-specific recipes for compiling the package and building binary package(s) from the source. .... At a minimum, required targets are the ones called by dpkg-buildpackage, namely, clean, binary, binary-arch, binary-indep, and build." If the policy is to be read very strictly, then all of the required targets must be present in debian/rules, however, this is either against the spirit of certain helper programs (eg CDBS and debhelper 7), or breaks the functionality of the helper (eg, using a .PHONY line will cause debhelper 7 to skip the target entirely). For someone new to CDBS, debhleper 7, or any other existing or future package helper, the reader of policy must either ignore the violations from this strict reading or relax the interpretation of policy in such a way to infer that helper programs provide these targets even though they are not explicitly listed. This is ambiguous. A specific example occurred recently when reviewing a package with a debian/rules file similar to /usr/share/doc/debhelper/examples/rules.tiny and running an older lintian on it. Lintian complained about the targets, so policy was consulted, and a strict reading shows that the rules file was in violation of policy. A discussion ensued and quite a bit of developer time was lost. Adding something like the following would greatly reduce the ambiguity of section 4.9: "A required target is one that is either explicitly listed in debian/rules or supplied by a helper program." A possible rewording of paragragh 3 is: "Since an interactive debian/rules script makes it impossible to auto-compile that package and also makes it hard for other people to reproduce the same binary package, all required targets MUST be non-interactive. A required target is one that is either explicitly listed in debian/rules or supplied by a helper program. At a minimum, required targets are the ones called by dpkg-buildpackage, namely, clean, binary, binary-arch, binary-indep, and build. It also follows that any target that these targets depend on must also be non-interactive." Thanks, Jamie -- System Information: Debian Release: squeeze/sid APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 2.6.28-13-generic (SMP w/2 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
