[Pkg-shadow-devel] build system and debian/rules discussion

[Christian Perrier]

> While the subject originally brought up had to do with dpatch, I've in
> fact heard some similar rants on things like cdbs, though until now I
> hadn't really seen the whole picture on the level of difficulty that
> using a variety of different build and patch helpers throughout the
> archives imposes on QA, bug reporters looking over source, etc.


I absolutely, completely and definitely disagree with Joey on that
topic, espcecially when it comes at Debian patches to upstream source
handling.

Remember the nightmare we had with shadow's diff .gz file when we came
up and started working on the package (the diff.gz was bigger than the
original source code).

We could never have reduced this to 187k with only digging in the
source.

Maintaining patches to upstream source with a system like dpatch or,
better, quilt, is the only way to really contribute to upstream and
keep track of patches proposed to upstream.

One of the duties of Debian package maintainers is contributing to
upstream and do our best to have Debian-originated suggestions and
patches go to usptream.

>From the experience we had in last weeks, we see that this often
requires that we first keep our patches Debian-specific and then
discuss with upstream (or remind her/him) about these patches.

This is simply not possible with a big huge diff.gz file, for instance
when the same file is patches several times because of different
issues.

So, no, dpatch should not be considered harmful, sorry....


About cdbs, I see it as a way to get Debian packages built in a
consistent way with only things *really* specific to the package going
to the debian/rules file...making it simpler to read.