Paul R. Tagliamonte: > Hey all, > > Please keep me on CC, I'm not subscribed > > Just bumping this to the development list too. The patch seems to work > fine here. Can someone provide some review or consider merging it? > > Thanks! > Paul > > On Tue, Dec 12, 2017 at 11:39 PM, Paul R. Tagliamonte <paul...@gmail.com> > wrote: >> tags 570935 + patch >> thanks >> >> Patch adding a DH_WITH environment var attached. >> >> -- >> :wq > > >
Hi Paul, Thanks for looking at improving debhelper. I have been looking at this, and I am left with a concern and one piece of "bike-shedding". The situation: ============== dh add-ons are order sensitive. That is, there are cases where "--with a,b" vs. "--with b,a" behaves different (the only know example was the autotools-dev and autoreconf add-ons, where you always wanted --with autotools-dev,autoreconf - in that order). This is a nasty misfeature. Unfortunately, it is a design flaw and cannot be trivially fixed without rewriting the entire dh add-on system. The concern: ============ A package maintainer can trivially shuffle the order of two add-ons, but the builder does not have this option. With the above mentioned "misfeature", I foresee that eventually someone will need to place an add-on in a different order than this patch allows (e.g. so they can inject theirs in the middle of two add-ons enabled by the package maintainer). I think the best solution here is for someone (probably me) to sit down and redesign the add-on system to avoid/fix the above misfeature. I suppose this can be done later if that ever becomes relevant (with this mail just serving to record the issue to cluebat myself if/when that becomes relevant). The bike-shedding: ================== I would prefer that the name of the variable(s) uses "add-on" / "ADDON" (e.g. DH_EXTRA_ADDONS) instead of WITH (DH_WITH). What it controls is which adds you enable - "WITH" says nothing about what it does (I appreciate it is a reference to the command line option, but I think an "ADDONS"-based name will be less confusing to newcomers/people with less/no debhelper experience). Thanks, ~Niels