[Monotone-debian] Re: Fw: [Monotone-commits-diffs] Revision 3d44c5dc2819aea71f826cedc5a1cb6745b06943

[Ludovic Brenta]

Richard Levitte wrote:
> Uhmmmm, there are some changes in there that I do not understand.
> 
> Why remove 'distclean' from the main Makefile?  What happens if
> someone wants to build directly from source, the usual GNU way?
> According to GNU standards, 'distclean' should be there.
> 
> In debian/rules, you have removed the '$(MAKE) distclean' line, but
> why?  After all, there's a test to check if the Makefile s there, so
> that line can't be harmful, and it's EXACTLY the kind of line that the
> Debian policy recommends, at least last time I checked...

I tried to explain this briefly in the commit log but that was obviously
insufficient, so let me expand.

Right after unpacking the sources and applying the Debian diff, config.make does
not exist yet. But dpkg-buildpackage calls "fakeroot debian/rules clean" before
anything. The subsequent call to "$(MAKE) distclean" therefore fails with a
fatal error that kills the build completely. So, the package would have FTBFS
on all buildds. In fact I discovered the problem because I did what the buildds
would have done.

To correct the problem, I copied the contents of the distclean (and clean)
targets into debian/rules. Later, I noticed that distclean was Debian-specific.
I removed it to minimise the Debian diff.

If you think conformance to GNU standards is a must, please report this as an
upstream bug. In any case, distclean is not mandatory to conform to Debian
standards, and is not otherwise necessary.

I hope this clarifies things.

BTW, there are other patches (glib/*.[ch]) in the Debian diff that I think
should be merged upstream.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.