Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 7, 2019 16:06 UTC (Fri) by Freeaqingme (guest, #103259)
Parent article: Seeking consensus on dh

I don't understand the reason for the focus on tools. Why not focus on the format instead?

I surmise that dh embeds data differently in a .deb file. Then why not focus on standardizing what data needs to be present inside of the package? We don't focus on what mail client is used on mailing lists, rather we focus on what format to adhere to. Seems a similar situation?

Whenever I need to make a debian package quickly, I just pick FPM ( https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm ). This works just fine, albeit ordinarily only used internally. If Debian wants to make any improvements to usability of packaging software, imho they should at least take a look at it to see how user friendly such software can be.

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Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 7, 2019 17:06 UTC (Fri) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

Wrong. The format (both what the source tree should contain and the contents of the resulting .deb files) are standardized. There's exactly one tool in Debian that builds a .deb file, and everybody ends up calling that. Eventually.

Packaging is more than "one easy tool". You need to build the package so that it stores its files in a directory tree other than the root, manage dependencies to other packages, register Python/Perl/Ruby/Go/Node/* libraries, separate libraries / documentation / debug info, install post-installation handlers and init scripts / systemd units, check for a avoidable packaging errors (forgot to de-boilerplate the copyright notice, anybody?), and a bunch of other things.

"dh" encapsulates a lot of overrideable/amendable knowledge on how to, given all that information, call a lot of other tools in order to do all of the above in the right order and eventually end up with that .deb file. More to the point, it encapsulates that knowledge so that if somebody creates/adds a better tool we can simply change/add that in dh, instead of having to touch 10000 debian/rules files.

Tools like FPM may be nice for one-shot personal use, or to build a third-party package for some distribution. But for distro-wide package creation? not realistic. There's a lot more to packaging than can be expressed in FPM command line options.