Thanks for the information, Josselin:
On Jan 29, 2009, at 7:10 AM, Josselin Mouette wrote:
Le mercredi 28 janvier 2009 à 07:44 -0700, zooko a écrit :
3. It would be okay for this process to be automated (or semi-
automated), but there's some flaw in the design of stdeb which
means it will never be able to do it right unless stdeb is
rewritten with a new design.
This is the one. BTW, I don’t consider this a flaw in stdeb, it’s
just that stdeb was not designed with the goal to produce packages
suitable for Debian itself.
What we need is the equivalent of dh_make_perl [0]. That is, a
script that will generate the debian/ structure in a semi-automated
fashion, leading to a package ready to be installed after minor
tweaks and a human’s review. Bonus points would go for providing a
script suggesting changes in the description and/or dependencies
when updating the package for a new upstream release.
A-ha! I think I understand the disagreement now! It hinges on the
subtle distinction between "manual", "automated", and "semi-automated".
Unless I'm misunderstanding something (which is quite possible),
stdeb already does exactly what you just suggested. It produces a
debian/ subdirectory and a .dsc file, which you can them feed into
"dpkg-buildpackage" to produce a .deb. You can, of course, inspect
and modify those files after stdeb produced then and before dpkg-
buildpackage consumes them.
http://github.com/astraw/stdeb/tree/master
Perhaps there is some confusion on this point because I like to
*talk* about stdeb as though it sucks in Python source trees and
spits out .deb's. That's how I like to use it -- I try not to look
at or change the .dsc or debian/ files. However, there's no
fundamental reason that I am aware of that it couldn't be used by a
real Debian developer to ease his task of producing completely Policy-
Compliant, high-quality Debian packages.
Apparently the Perl and Haskell Debian developers have already
started using semi-automation this way to maintain large numbers of
Policy-Compliant Perl and Haskell .deb's produced from Perl and
Haskell source trees.
If you, or anyone, tries this, please post to this list and also Cc:
me (the list is just too high-volume for me to keep up :-() and I'll
try to help.
Regards,
Zooko
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