Bug#705068: Please provide dh-make library for non-perl packaging helpers

[Damyan Ivanov]

Control: tag -1 help

Almost 10 years later, I think it is obvious the dh-make-perl authors 
(me included) aren't very keen on separating the parts that are 
specific to the Debian Perl Group and providing a more universal 
library that can be used by others.

-=| Thomas Koch, 08.05.2013 19:49:19 +0200 |=-
> Some clarifications:
> 
> There is for example a lot of logic in the package 
> DhMakePerl::Command::Packaging that I'd like to reuse for java packaging. For 
> that I'd need a reliable API and some logic would need to extracted from 
> larger functions into separate functions:
> 
> * get_developer(), get_wnpp() are fine for reuse
> * fill_maintainer() has hardcoded reference to perl team
> * set_package_name() contains logic to fall back to create a perl library 
> package name
> * extract_desc() contains useful logic to format the long package description
> * ...
> 
> I think it's fine to keep all this logic in the dh-make-perl package. It would 
> just be helpful to have a clear distinction between reusable code 
> that could be used for languages other than perl and code specific 
> for packaging perl.

Right. These are all good ideas. They "just" need someone to implement 
them. We won't, it seems, so I am tagging the bugreport with 'help'.

If I was going to do it, I'd try to split all DPG-specific parts into 
a ::Packaging::DPG or a similar package, sublcassing ::Packaging, and 
change dh-make-perl to use that.

Then another tool, say dh-make-java, would need to provide 
::Packaging::Java, subclassing ::Packaging with Java-specific 
functions.

Perhaps there are some perl-specific things outside ::Packaging too.

The whole thing involves identifying domain specific parts, some 
shuffling around and a lot of testing. I hope people who need this 
functionality would be able to spend the time to try it.


-- Damyan