CODEWITHSUNDEEP
debianpackagingdebdebhelper
Aaron Wright
Aaron Wright

Reputation: 358

debhelper dh not rerunning when expected to

I was converting some of my packages to use dh from the debhelper package, when I noticed that it doesn't support rerunning targets.

For example:

  1. I run debian/rules build to check a build.
  2. Make a small code change.
  3. Run debian/rules build again, and it does nothing.

Or another common example I do:

  1. I run fakeroot debian/rules binary to check if I have everything installed in the package correctly.
  2. Find something missing; correct the problem.
  3. Run fakeroot debian/rules binary to test out the change, and it does nothing.

This is a big change in behavior from CDBS, which I was previously using. Is there a work around for this? I don't feel like running debian/rules clean should be required in these situations.

debian/rules:

    #!/usr/bin/make -f

    export DEB_CXXFLAGS_MAINT_APPEND+=-std=gnu++0x

    %:
       dh $@

Upvotes: 1

Views: 286

Answers (1)

the paul
the paul

Reputation: 9161

Yep, that's an intended and necessary behavior for dh (it has to keep track of what steps it has taken already, because it will usually be invoked several times over the course of a full package build and it can't leverage the internals of make to keep state. It's kind of a terrible hack, but it is a decent solution given the terrible problem constraints).

To be fair, it hasn't ever been well-defined what debian/rules build is supposed to do when there's already a partial build. If a build has succeeded previously and no state has been cleared, it's not unreasonable for Debhelper to treat the build as done.

It might be a solution to your problem just to use dh_clean when you want to start a build over. That won't invoke dh_auto_clean, so if your code gets built outside of the debian/ directory, it won't be touched, but the Debhelper state will be cleaned.

If instead you want to be able to "rewind" the partial debhelper build so that it thinks a build hasn't yet been done, you might try using a script that does something like

#!/bin/bash
sed -i -e '/dh_auto_build/,$ d' debian/*.debhelper.log

That will remove the "dh_auto_build" entry and everything after it from any *.debhelper.log build state, so that dh will think they haven't been done. Any steps it took up to that point will still be considered done.

Upvotes: 1

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