Package: devscripts Version: 2.10.25 Severity: important Hello,
while investigating #476054 I discovered that debuild is really a fork of dpkg-buildpackage and no more a simple wrapper of it. (BTW the manual page is wrong... it says "It first runs dpkg-buildpackage" which is not the case unless you have dpkg-cross installed... BTW dpkg-cross does no more divert dpkg-buildpackage in its latest versions). This is _bad_ because: 1/ developer using debuild don't have the same behaviour than buildd using dpkg-buildpackage... we have concrete examples now that supplementary features have been added like default values for CFLAGS or stuff like that. They receive FTFBS bug reports and they can't reproduce it because they use debuild and not dpkg-buildpackage like the rest of the Debian infrastructure. 2/ somehow it feels like the devscripts developer consider dpkg-buildpackage dead code that can't be changed... and instead of working with the dpkg developers to add the missing features, you work around by duplicating its code and modifying it. This isn't the kind of cooperation that I expect. (Granted, the dpkg team might not have always been as reactive as it is, but that's not a good excuse :-)) The differing behaviour is going to cause enough troubles that I decided to use important as severity. Feel free to change it if you want. Anyway, in general, I'd like the devscripts developers to think twice at what is appropriate for devscripts and what is appropriate for dpkg-dev. Feel free to redirect some of your wishlist bugs on dpkg-dev or at least seek our opinion if you're not sure of the right place for a given feature. I'am now awaiting from you some wishlist bugs on dpkg-dev so that we can fill in the gaps of missing features on dpkg-buildpackage and get rid of that ugly fork. You can also patch your copy to add the same set of features as quick fix, but I really want to cleanup the situation in the mid-term. Thanks for your comprehension. Cheers, Raphaël Hertzog.
