I recently noticed that when building with dpkg-buildpackage there is no need for the
DEB_BUILD_GNU_TYPE := $(shell dpkg-architecture -qDEB_BUILD_GNU_TYPE) DEB_HOST_GNU_TYPE := $(shell dpkg-architecture -qDEB_HOST_GNU_TYPE) boilerplate in debian/rules You can just do the test: ifeq ($(DEB_BUILD_GNU_TYPE),$(DEB_HOST_GNU_TYPE)) and it works, so it looks like dpkg-buildpackage is now setting those vars for us. This is good and sensible, it's just that it's news to me. Anyone know when this happened and what if any, the limitations are? It's certainly true in wheezy, squeeze, precise and oineiric. Should a package depending on this behaviour build-dep on a particular dpkg version? As it already works in build-essential in stable do the same rules apply as essential packages in stable (i.e no explicit dependency required)? That would be consistent. Maybe it's been doing it since forever? Now, you can build packages without using dpkg-buildpackage by calling rules directly, and in that case the rules file would need to call dpkg-architecture, but someone would have to convince me that that was an interface worth supporting for non-native builds, because I have certainly always considered the minimal interface for cross package-building to be dpkg-buildpackage -a<arch>, and in practice there are other things you need to do for non-trivial packages (set CONFIG_SITE, set DEB_BUILD_OPTS=nocheck). (and ensure various things like toolchain and dpkg-cross are installed). And I don't think we want that stuff in every single rules file. This actually leads to a wider discussion about which tools should be responsible for setting which things in order to get a consistent build-environment for crossing. I don't think we've ever really thought about it very hard - conventional practices have just sort of collected. Should dpkg-buildpackage set everything needed, or can we require a higher-level cross-aware too for that? I have thus far taken the view that dpkg-buildpackage does no more than set the architecture. A calling tool (sbuild for multiarch building or xdeb for dpkg-cross building) is responsible for setting up anything else in the environment. But I reserve the right to modify this view over time. I've started a wiki page to collect good-practice guidelines. contributions welcome. http://wiki.debian.org/CrossBuildPackagingGuidelines Wookey -- Principal hats: Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM http://wookware.org/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20120329181005.gs26...@dream.aleph1.co.uk
