[debhelper-devel] Bug#755412: debhelper: dh_install does not find file because dh_auto_install did not place them where expected

[Christophe]

Package: debhelper
Version: 9.20140613
Severity: normal
Tags: upstream

Dear Maintainer,

I am trying to build from source the package 'konq-plugins' with a few hacks.
To do this, I am using 'apt-get source ...' (ok), then some hacks, then
'buildpackage -rfakeroot -uc -b' as found there:
  http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/apt-howto/ch-sourcehandling.en.html

The creation of the package fails at dh_install step:

make[2]: Leaving directory '[...]/kde-baseapps-4.12.4/obj-x86_64-linux-gnu'
dh_install  
cp: cannot stat ‘debian/tmp/usr/lib/kde4/autorefresh.so’: No such file or directory
dh_install: cp -a debian/tmp/usr/lib/kde4/autorefresh.so debian/konq-plugins-curis//usr/lib/kde4/ returned exit code 1
/usr/share/pkg-kde-tools/qt-kde-team/2/dhmk.mk:97: recipe for target 'pre_install_dh_install' failed
make[1]: *** [pre_install_dh_install] Error 2

Apparently, there is no directory 'tmp' and the file is already at the 'final' place because 'dh_auto_install' seems to have already got it installed in 'konq-plugins-curis':

make[1]: Entering directory '/home/curis/Programming/kde-baseapps-4.12.4'
dh_testroot  
dh_prep  
dh_installdirs  
dh_auto_install '--buildsystem=kde' --parallel  
make[2]: Entering directory '[...]/kde-baseapps-4.12.4/obj-x86_64-linux-gnu'
  [...]
-- Installing: [...]/kde-baseapps-4.12.4/debian/konq-plugins-curis/usr/lib/kde4/autorefresh.so

>From my (small) investigation, it seems in line with what the code does, because amongst my hacks the control file now defines only one package (instead of many), and in 'dh_auto_install' there is:

        my @allpackages=getpackages();
        if (@allpackages > 1) {
                $destdir="debian/tmp";
        } else {
                $destdir=tmpdir($dh{MAINPACKAGE});
        }

but it seems that 'dh_install' is not ready for this optimisation?

Best regards,
Christophe.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.14-1-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages debhelper depends on:
ii  binutils    2.24.51.20140617-1
ii  dpkg        1.17.10
ii  dpkg-dev    1.17.10
ii  file        1:5.19-1
ii  man-db      2.6.7.1-1
ii  perl        5.18.2-6
ii  po-debconf  1.0.16+nmu3

debhelper recommends no packages.

Versions of packages debhelper suggests:
pn  dh-make  <none>

-- no debconf information