Package: debhelper Version: 13.14.1 Severity: normal Hello,
supporting build-profiles like nodoc with dh_install seems to cumbersome. If the not-always-built files were listed in debian/foo.install the build would fail when the build profile was active (because they were not built/available). As second plan I tried to conditionally install them directly using command-line arguments to dh_install like this: override_dh_install: ifneq ($(filter nodoc,$(DEB_BUILD_PROFILES)),) dh_install else dh_install -Ngnupg-l10n dh_install -pgnupg-l10n --autodest \ 'usr/share/gnupg/help.*.txt' \ usr/share/gnupg/help.txt endif This also failed, since for a --build=any build debhelper decides that "dh_install -pgnupg-l10n ..." is a noop and does not add the files to debian/.debhelper/generated/gnupg-l10n/installed-by-dh_install, in turn causing a build-error by dh_missing. The third plan was to make evaluation of debian/gnupg-l10n.install dynamic by using substitutions. I tried these in the install files * ${env:LISTOFSTUFF} (with LISTOFSTUFF being set to a file or directory or an empty string (nodoc-case) * "${env:DISABLE}usr/share/foo" and setting DISABLE='# ' for the nodoc case. Neither of these worked, comment and empty-line processing seems to be disabled for expanded stuff. The whole thing was a little bit frustrating by being too complicated and I think that plan #3 should have worked according to the docs. Which is why this bug-report is about this case. cu Andreas PS: I ended up using an executable debian/gnupg-l10n.install, which works, but I' d rather keep all nodoc processing in one place in debian/rules.