[maemo-developers] Debhelper 7

[From: Marius Vollmer]

ext Teemu Ikonen <tpikonen at gmail.com> writes:

> [...] Do you have any specific idea on why debhelper 7 does not run on
> Fremantle SDK (I suppose there's no need to run it on the device)?  Is
> there any chance at all to get it working, by upgrading perl or some
> other magic?

Yes, there is a chance, but it is not pretty.

The Fremantle SDK, like all versions of the Maemo SDK, uses Scratchbox
with a specific set of devkits.  One of the devkits is the debian-etch
one, and that devkit contains debhelper.

The nature of devkits is that they shadow whatever is in the target.
Thus, installing debhelper 7 in the target doesn't do anything: you will
still get the debhelper from the devkit.

You would either have to update the devkit itself, or somehow disable it
while building your package only.

You can disable the devkits with a snippet like this in debian/rules:

    # Sanitize build environment when running inside Scratchbox 1
    ifneq (,$(wildcard /targets))
       export SBOX_REDIRECT_TO_DIRS=
       export PATH=/scratchbox/compilers/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/scratchbox/tools/bin
    endif

This is a hack, and you have to assume responsibility for all the
fall-out that it produces. :)

That's the magic.  You will likely need to update Perl as well, and then
update many many Perl modules.  This is what I have done for Harmattan,
and now I am sitting on about 100 packages that I have updated... :-)

You can also backport debhelper 7 to Perl 5.8.

On balance, I think it is better to just stick to debhelper 5 in
Fremantle.