As I understand it, exporting environment/make variables is not readily possible from debhelper - it runs as a child process to make and hence changes made to the environment in debhelper will only affect child processes of debhelper, not those existing directly in d/rules.
For one approach, see pybuild which understands environment variables containing commands which it executes at the appropriate time after performing variable substitution, eg export PYBUILD_AFTER_INSTALL=chmod -x '{destdir}/{install_dir}/foo/bar.py' which works, but admittedly looks a bit inelegant. Another option is to provide a small helper script (in the style of `pkg-config`) which uses the relevant bits of dh-r to generate the necessary strings - so you could do something like export debRlib=$(dh-r --debrlib) export cranNameOrig=$(dh-r --crannameorig) Finally, any such manual intervention found in multiple packages should (if possible) be implemented as part of the build process so it becomes unnecessary. (Do you have a list of packages for which you've encountered issues?) Gordon -- debian-science-maintainers mailing list debian-science-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/debian-science-maintainers