[Dict-common-dev] po-debconf and the dictionaries-common policy

[Agustin Martin Domingo]

Denis Barbier wrote:
> 
> But po2debconf is called twice in installdeb-ispell, both directly and
> indirectly through dh_installdebconf.  

Your are right, that was written to work even if the installed debhelper
version lacked po-debconf support (mostly for experiments under woody 
for maintainers that at some time had no access to a sid box). Now that 
is mostly unnecesary. I am raising debhelper dependency in 
dictionaries-common-dev to make sure dh_installdebconf is po2debconf 
aware. Thanks for pointing out this.

> A simpler option is not to rename
> templates and config files, let installdeb-ispell call dh_installdebconf,
> then fix those files copied under tmpdir($package)."/DEBIAN/templates".

I personally prefer to hack before installing DEBIAN/{templates,config}. 
The simplest fix for me (to be tested) is not to call po2debconf 
explicitely in installdeb-*, but simply copy 
$package.po-master.templates file, merged with the system templates, 
into $package.templates, something like changing in installdeb*

-         $orig = `po2debconf $infile`;
+         $orig = `cat $infile`;

dh_installdebconf will do the rest of the work, and since the dependency 
change is in dictionaries-common-dev maintainers need not to do any 
additional changes, what is desirable.

> You can even remove calls to dh_installdebconf and assume it has to
> be called before installdeb-ispell, this script then only patches
> DEBIAN/templates and DEBIAN/config files (plus other stuff not related
> to debconf).

This would break most ispell/wordlist packages builds until is changed 
in all, so maintainers will need to rebuild the packages and set a 
dependency. If works (I still have to test that carefully), I am more 
for the above solution.

Thanks for your feedback, Denis

-- 
Agustin