2006-11-18
CDBS and kittens
Steinar H. Gunderson wrote about CDBS once again, and I couldn’t agree more. CDBS introduces a lot of complexity for non-trivial packages, and it especially is basically undocumented. So what is CDBS’s value? For non-trivial packages, it is hard to use, since you basically need to decipher the CDBS code. For trivial packages however, it doesn’t add much value over dh_make. That’s actually sad: I like the general idea behind CDBS, but it is implemented badly IMHO. What it should do, if implemented right is to automate anything you want done on an easy package while providing and documenting (which includes consistently named hooks and options) all the interfaces needed to maintain non-trivial packages. Ideally, this would even include packages which need multiple build runs (like providing two differently configured versions of the same binary in two packages). But as said: It would need consistent names and proper documentation, and CDBS fails both currently. I however hope this improves in the future. Don’t ask me to work on this however, since personally, I’m quite happy using debhelper on my packages, since it is removing complexity (not typing work or lines of code) from debian/rules while keeping it obvious from that file what is done during a build.
I would really like to see the reasoning from Erich on why he thinks CDBS is NMU-friendly, since I don’t get why he thinks so from his blog post.
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