uploaded first pkg: pd-motex

[Jonas Smedegaard]

On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 08:37:36PM -0400, Andres Mejia wrote:

>I would like to chime in and say that with the packages I've worked on 
>(besides my own), I found that both dh and cdbs get whatever I need 
>done. I however prefer dh.

I suspect that you (like Benjamin) mean modern short-form debhelper 
above - not classic debhelper (which is not really comparable to CDBS):

  * Classic debhelper solves certain atomic tasks
  * CDBS offer patterns to invoke external tools, e.g. classic debhelper
  * Modern shortform dh invokes classic debhelper (and more) as patterns


>Really the only reason I've stuck with dh over cdbs in my packages is 
>because cdbs depends on debhelper. cdbs even build depends on 
>debhelper. I've asked myself, "what's the point of having 2 build 
>dependencies when 1 is all that I need". Because of this, I found that 
>I may as well use debhelper directly for packaging, as opposed to using 
>debhelper indirectly via cdbs.

I suspect your reasoning to be flawed:

CDBS build-depends on some packages for its regression tests, among 
those debhelper and default-jdk.  No, CDBS neither rely on debhelper nor 
on Java at runtime, despite these build-dependencies.

CDBS depends (at runtime) on debhelper because an exotic feature in the 
optional debhelper.mk snippet needs at least debhelper 5.0.30, but it is 
not possible to express a versioned recommends.


>I'm not sure if I'm alone in this kind of reasoning. However, if you 
>can somehow remove cdbs dependency on debhelper, I'm sure cdbs would be 
>much more interesting.

Actually that dependency _is_ possible to remove.  But what would we 
gain?

NB! CDBS never provided the functionality of classic debhelper.


>Now if it's already possible to use cdbs without debhelper, than I'll 
>go ahead and admit that I did not know. So far however, I haven't found 
>how to use cdbs without debhelper in cdbs documentation or in cdbs 
>examples. Also, cdbs dependency and build dependency on debhelper leads 
>me to believe that it's not currently possible.

It *is* possible.  But CDBS does not do what classic debhelper does, so 
unless you want to do that yourself, I fail to understand your reasoning 
here.

As I see it, CDBS and classic debhelper is *not* comparable, but works 
together (none of them depending on the other, really).  CDBS and the 
*overlay* provided by newer releases of debhelper - the short-form dh 
tool" - an addition, not a replacement, to the classic dh_* tools - are 
comparable, and is what Benjamin asked clarification about earlier in 
this thread.


Hope that helps.

  - Jonas


P.S.

As you no doubt have noticed by now, I really like CDBS.  That does not 
mean, however, that I want to spam all lists with praising it: if you 
consider this topic irrelevant to discuss, then don't!

-- 
  * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
  * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

  [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
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