[pkg-go] [RFC] honoring DH_GOLANG_EXCLUDES for sources ?

[Clément Hermann]

Hi!

I'm newly joined to the team, packaging some dependancies for LXD [0]
mainly.

While working on golang-gopkg-lxc-go-lxc, Martin (Tincho) pointed to me
that I should exclude examples from source - which surprised me, because
I thought I did. But indeed, I misread the man page [1], which plainly
states that this is about excluding _targets_.

OTOH, the example debian/rule extract is:

> 
> # We want to ship only the library packages themselves, not the accompanying
>             # example binaries.
>             export DH_GOLANG_EXCLUDES := examples/


And in this case, we probably want to put the examples where they
belong, that is, in the documentation, not in the source.
So that mean we have to delete them from the source once they are copied.

What if we didn't copy them in the first place ?

I had a look at the code of dh-golang, and it wouldn't be difficult to
use the same logic we have in the configure sub in install.

I actually started a branch to implement it.


Now the issue is dealing with this change (if it's indeed a change, it
could be an addition):

- we could just decide to honor the excludes in install, at least for
sources and maybe bin. Then we have to deal with legacy, just in case,
so it should be possible to trigger it off, and at some point in the
future, we decide if it becomes the default or not.

- we could just add another variable for sources, and maybe also for
bin. It looks counter-intuitive to me, but then it allows to deal with
the case when you want to exclude something from source but not from
target (regex problem, similar dir names in subdirs, etc).

What do you think ?

Cheers,

-- 
nodens

[0] https://bugs.debian.org/768073
[1] Debian::Debhelper::Buildsystem::golang(3pm)