[Debian GNUstep maintainers] Re: progress on GNUstep packages

[Hubert Chan]

On Tue, 20 Sep 2005 23:05:29 +0200, Matthias Klose said:

> Is a debhelper script really the right approach? My feeling was, that
> _only_ gnustep-make should be changed to install and use to the new
> locations. You could even make it dependent on some environment
> variable, which is set at build time.

For one thing, I don't have a particular desire to hack gnustep-make...

I think a debhelper script is the simplest approach, rather than trying
to hunt down everything in gnustep-make that tries to install a file,
and seeing if it needs to be modified.  Most of the
architecture-independent stuff falls into a small number of directories
that are easily picked out by a script.  It will also be robust against
upstream modifications to gnustep-make; my personal preference is to
make as few modifications to upstream code as possible.

Another advantage of it is that we don't have to worry about messing up
installing into the Network, Local, or User domains.  (As I understand
it, under those domains, we want everything to be installed under the
normal GNUstep locations; we're only worried about FHS-compliance for
Debian packages, which will only affect the System domain.)

Of course the downside is that all GNUstep packages will have to be
modified to call the debhelper script, but that's just a one-line
modification.  And if gnustep-make is controlled by an environment
variable, all the packages would have to be modified anyways.

Also, if someone wants to do a Debian-based GNUstep distribution, it
would make their lives easier.  Presumably, they would care more about
keeping the GNUstep hierarchy than about FHS-compliance, so they could
use the same source packages, and just replace dh_gnustep with a blank
script.

Of course, this is just my opinion.  If you think that modifying
gnustep-make would be better, I would be interested in hearing about
your opinion.

-- 
Hubert Chan <hubert at uhoreg.ca> - http://www.uhoreg.ca/
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