Hi all, The current debian-policy package build rules generate a package using the low-level dpkg plumbing directly, including calling dpkg --build. This is something Manoj did routinely in his packages, and I subsequently preserved it since it made some sense to me for the Debian Policy package to not rely on any of the various helper layers.
Over time, though, I've started changing my mind on this. While there's some argument for Debian Policy being a special case, I think there's a much stronger argument for having the packaging be boring and typical and looking like any other package in the archive. I don't think we've really benefited from the manual packaging over the years, and there have been various minor bugs I've had to fix that would have been fixed automatically (most recently not passing the correct flags to gzip for reproducible builds). I therefore intend to: - Move all the formatting build machinery into the top-level Makefile. - Convert the packaging to dh with a minimal debian/rules file. - Move the doc-base registration files into debian with *.doc-base names. My guess is that nearly no one will care, but if I'm missing some reason not to do this, please let me know. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
