[Pkg-ruby-extras-maintainers] r362 - in tools/ruby-pkg-tools/trunk: 1/class debian

[Thierry Reding]

Hi all,

this commit was actually supposed to only incorporate the changes needed to
get a configurable DEB_RUBY_CLEAN_ARGS variable into the ruby-setup.rb class,
but it turned out that this change brought up another issue which would break
packages using the new change (specifically libsvg-ruby, which was the reason
for this patch in the first place).

The problem is as follows: if a package is first built, the clean target from
debian/rules is run before actually building the binary package(s). This
results in an error for some packages because their install.rb or setup.rb
scripts require the `config' command to be run before `(dist)clean' can
succeed.

This has been solved by prepending a `-' to the command, thus having make
ignore any errors. I recently came across this bug report[0] which considers
this practice harmful. While the bug report is primarily concerned with GNU
autotools, the same applies for install.rb and setup.rb scripts.

One possible alternative proposed was to first configure, then clean, which
makes sure that clean can be run successfully, or better, it ensures that if
cleaning fails there really is something wrong, and it's not just a matter of
the package being in an unconfigured state. The second, more sane,
alternative would be to test for the existence of any required files
(Makefile in case of GNU autotools) in order for clean to be able to run.

Now, I've gone ahead and implemented the first alternative in the
ruby-setup-rb.mk class, because I'm not sure about which files to check for
in order to implement the second alternative. Since this increases the
overhead of building packages I wanted to get any comments on this change
before this is actually released. Maybe someone more knowledgeable about
install.rb/setup.rb has some ideas for implementing alternative two.
Otherwise I guess I could dive into those scripts to find out what they use
as criteria for marking a package as being configured.

Also if you all think I'm being paranoid here, and that ignoring errors from
clean is okay, then undoing the change might be a better idea =).

Cheers,
Thierry

[0]: http://lists.debian.org/debian-lint-maint/2005/08/msg00116.html

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