Re: [PATCH 4/4] debian: add generic rule file

[Theodore Y. Ts'o]

On Mon, Jul 15, 2019 at 08:56:25PM +0200, Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult wrote:
> On 15.07.19 14:28, Masahiro Yamada wrote:
> 
> >> The rule file contains a rule for creating debian/control and
> >> other metadata - this is done similar to the 'deb-pkg' make rule,
> >> scripts/packaging/mkdebian.
> > 
> > I saw a similar patch submission before, and negative feedback about it.
> 
> Do you recall what negative feedback exactly ?

It's possible I'm not remembering some of the feedback, but the only
thing I recall was the comment I made that I'd really like this use
case:

make O=/build/linux-build bindeb-pkg

to not break.  And as far as I can tell from the proposed patch series
(I haven't had a chance to experimentally verify it yet), I don't
think it should break anything --- I'm assuming that we will still
have a way of creating the debian/rules file in
/build/linux-build/debian/rules when doing a O= build, and that the
intdeb-pkg rule remains the same.  At least, it appears to be the case
from my doing a quick look at the patches.

> > Debian maintains its own debian/rules, and it is fine.
> 
> Not for me, I don't use it - given up trying to make anything useful
> out of it. It's extremly complex, practically undebuggable and doesn't
> even work w/o lots of external preparations.

Yeah, the official Debian debian/rules is optimized for doing a
distribution release, and in addition to the issues Enrico has raised,
last time I tried it, it was S-L-O-W since it was building a fully
generic kernel.  It's not at all useable for general developer use.

It sounds like what Enrico is trying to do is to enable running
"dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -b" from the the top-level kernel package
as being easier than running "make bindeb-pkg".  I suspect this might
be because his goal is to integrate individual kernel builds from
using Debian's hermetic build / chroot systems (e.g., sbuild, pbuilder)?

     	       		      	       	       	      - Ted