[Aptitude-devel] Targets in aptitude's building system and debian/rules's build-arch/build-indep -- was Re: Bug#465076:

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

2012/2/22 Daniel Hartwig <mandyke at gmail.com>:
> tags 465076 + pending
> tags 648490 + pending
> thanks
>
> These two will be fixed with the next version:
>
> #465076 [w|+|  ] [aptitude] aptitude: mass bug filing for cross build support
> #648490 [w|+|  ] [src:aptitude] aptitude: Please add support for
> build-arch and build-indep targets

Are you working on this?

Actually I am knee-deep entangled in revamping the whole packaging
according to newer debhelper compat level 9, and I am stumbling in
some nasty problems.  I am no expert on autotools so I don't know very
well what to do and I was already going to write about this.

Currently, what debian/rules does is to compile the project twice, one
for aptitude-curses (the target binary named 'aptitude', then moved as
'aptitude-curses') and then another time from scratch to aptitude-gtk
(again, target binary named 'aptitude' and then renamed), adding the
necessary GTK flags to compiler/linker.  Then, for creating the deb
packages, it performs some... not black, but grey magic here and there
in a not very clear way (or a way that I haven't seen before in my
days of Debian Maintainer).

I got a quite clean and much more straightforward than the current
debian/rules, but then things need to be complicated again due to this
double-pass (which would be triple-pass if Qt build was activated).
The ideal situation would be to compile only once, producing the two
binary targets, and then pick the necessary files for each binary
debian package.

If you stumbled upon this, what are your ideas?

If there are other people which know their way with autotools, please
take a look and give your ideas too.

Cheers.


PS: Wild idea: we could also ditch aptitude-gtk, there are many
reports complaining that it's not any good because it lacks the
sophistication of aptitude-curses, it's very crashy, etc.  The main
point is whether there would be somebody to step up and maintain it
and improve it (I don't know almost anything about GTK and I am not
inclined to learn it).

PS2: The compilation is very slow, I think that by cutting out clutter
(e.g. undue loads of includes for targets not needing them) it can be
made much quicker.