Pull in some functionality from stdeb

There is also another competing package skeleton builder tool: /usr/bin/python-mkdebian.

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~python-distutils-extra-hackers/python-distutils-extra/debian/annotate/head:/debian/local/python-mkdebian

On Tue, 23 Mar 2010 19:38:07 -0000, Barry Warsaw <email address hidden> wrote:
> Public bug reported:
>
> For standard Python packages with a setup.py, it would be nice if bzr-
> builddeb could pull in some of stdeb's functionality for creating the
> initial packaging layout (e.g. via 'bzr dh-make'?).
>
> stdeb lives here: http://github.com/astraw/stdeb
>
> stdeb mostly does the right thing, except it does it in the wrong place.
> I.e. it doesn't know anything about bzr branches so it creates the
> debian directory instead the package-version directory in the cwd. This
> means you have to move debian/ up a couple of parents to situate it
> correctly.

I will look in to what it does more carefully.

> However stdeb has some advantages:
>
> * it doesn't ask you any questions (jfdi ftw \o/)
> * it creates a more correct debian/control file based on setup.py hints
> * (stdeb doesn't pick the right debian/copyright file based on setup.py, but bzr-builddeb should!)
> * it removes all the crufty .ex files and what not
> * (stdeb doesn't initialize the debian/watch file, but bzr-builddeb should!)

These would be great things to do, but I'm not going to implement any
of this specific functionality in bzr-builddeb.

If we decide that stdeb should be used for python packages then I want
those improvements to be done in stdeb. I'm all for helping with that
though.

Ideally this bug would be fixed with dh_make (what we currenly call)
handling python packages better, either by calling stdeb, or them
merging. Failing that we could call stdeb if the package looks like a
python one.

Thanks,

James

I think we can do more than use dh-make; a problem with dh-make is that its one-shot. Tracking setup.py would be per-update, not from-scratch-each-time.

I think bzr-builddeb's role in this might be to supply a couple of relevant hooks, or metadata to them, if the hooks are supplied by e.g. dpkg.