Package: debhelper Version: 7.4.3 Severity: wishlist Tags: patch Today on #debian-mentors, we were looking to see why a doc-base file didn't appear in the final package, depsite the call to dh_installdocs being included in the build log. It turned out that there was a spare space at the start of the "Document: " line so debhelper ignores the file.
Any other sort of malformed doc-base file would also be silently ignored. Sure, crappy doc-base files shouldn't be in debian/ but it would be nicer if dh_installdocs complained about them rather than just passing over it. The attached patch emits a warning if the /^Document\s*:\s*(.*)/ match fails. (warning rather than verbose_print as this is something that the maintainer almost certainly should be fixing) cheers Stuart
--- dh_installdocs-orig 2009-11-11 00:03:24.000000000 +0000 +++ dh_installdocs 2009-11-11 00:32:03.000000000 +0000 @@ -279,4 +279,6 @@ $doc_ids{$fn}=$1; last; + } else { + warning("Ignoring $fn as it is incorrectly formatted."); } }