Source: debhelper Source-Version: 13.8 Severity: wishlist Hi!
In dpkg, there are the original man pages and the translated ones, which can appear and disappear on each version depending on their translation percentage. Supporting this with debhelper has been a bit of a pain over the years. Before recently, the last incarnation was using manual make rules to install these conditionally, but that started to fail with dh_missing. So, I misrecalled that this was due to a bug now fixed in debhelper and switched that to use brace expansion: dpkg commit 01e66a1a8f2d7d8023073d88b4d2b3135d7a4668 Then during the release process noticed and recalled, that while debhelper "supports" it (as in it currently works), it is not a supported feature as per the docs, see #642129. And debhelper(7): When appropriate, in cases like these, you can use standard shell wildcard characters (? and * and [..] character classes) in the files. So, while officially supporting this could be just a matter of updating that paragraph (and the lintian warning), I'm not sure you agree with that. If you do I'm happy to provide a patch, otherwise of course feel free to close the report. While I guess I could switch to use executable .manpages files (which has always seemed a bit meh to me), or try to find some other way to drive these, somehow. (I guess ideally, it would be nice for debhelper to support marking pathnames as optionally present, which could also solve this by not using brace expansion but some other means. Perhaps that would be something you might entertain instead? Again, if not please close. :) Thanks, Guillem
