severity 652945 wishlist thanks On 11-12-22 at 12:45am, Steve McIntyre wrote: > Package: cdbs > Version: 0.4.100 > Severity: grave > Justification: zero documentation, wasting hours of development time, causing > many bugs > > I've just wasted multiple hours trying to fix up the mess in an NMU > (#652369). That bug itself isn't necessarily caused by CDBS itself, > but a lot of the time I've spent trying to fix it definitely is.
(note for later: that was 1 (one) bug, _not_ caused by CDBS) > I've just had to update the dvbstreamer package's local copy of > libtool to make it build binaries in a current unstable chroot. After > fighting through the CDBS code to decipher how to do that (yay for > total lack of documentation!), I've found DEB_AUTO_UPDATE_LIBTOOL that > seems to do what I need. True, CDBS currently lacks formal documentation. > Unfortunately, it doesn't take copies of any of the existing upstream > files to be able to put them back during a "debian/rules clean" run. > That means that dpkg-source v3 (quilt) bitches and refuses to run > again once I've done a build due to uncommitted changes. True, DEB_AUTO_UPDATE_LIBTOOL helps you update Libtool, but does not help you restore during clean. You may also find dh-autoreconf useful. I am unaware if it works alone or is entangled with short-form "dh" these days. Contrary to common misconception, CDBS does not conflict with debhelper but complements it. Short-form "dh" debhelper syntax conflicts with CDBS, though. > Hence, I can't tweak things and re-run dpkg-buildpackage/debuild while > debugging things (as already complained about elsewhere this week). Wrong: CDBS only helping you partly does not mean that you "can't tweak things". > I've looked in vain for any way to make this work, but cannot find > one. Not sure where you looked in vain (yes, you already mentioned that documentation i lacking so obviously I expect you to be talking about something else - not repeating yourself!). What I typically do is look at other CDBS-using packages for inspiration. Try look at liblrdf, it does little other tweaking than regenerating autotools incl. Libtool. > Therefore, I'm about to upload my new NMU with working packages > but (as far as I'm concerned) a buggy build system that will reliably > fail to build twice in a row. If this wasn't an NMU and therefore I > wasn't trying to keep changes minimal, I would be fixing the package > more deeply by repackaging it without CDBS. > > Please remove this under-documented and badly-designed rubbish from > the archive. It's been responsible for bad maintainer behaviour and > lots of RC bugs in the past, and I can see this happening again and > again in future. Apart from lack of documentation (reported already in bug#649151), the "causing many bugs" really is one bug which you yourself describe as not caused by CDBS. I therefore consider this a rant and a wish for CDBS to disappear, and have lowered severity accordingly. Kind regards, - Jonas -- * 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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