[maemo-developers] up-to-date debhelper and cdbs

[From: Jeff Moe]

On Sunday 24 January 2010 03:54:16 Thomas Tanner wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> many Debian packages require more recent versions of debhelper
> or cdbs than the outdated ones installed in the scratchbox devkits
> (debhelper 5.0.42 and cdbs 0.4.48, both more than 3 years old).
> The newer version make packaging also much easier.
> 
> I think I have found a minimally invasive workaround how to
> use the latest version of debhelper (7.4.10) and cdbs (0.4.62)
> in the SDK and autobuilder (see later).
> 
> HOWTO:
> In your debian/control file replace the dependencies
> 
> debhelper (>= 7) with debhelper7
> cdbs (> 0.4.48) with cdbs-dh7
> 
> add the following to the beginning of your debian/rules
> 
> PATH:=/usr/bin:$(PATH)
> export PATH
> SBOX_REDIRECT_IGNORE:=$(shell echo /usr/bin/{perl,dh_*} | sed "s/ /:/g")
> export SBOX_REDIRECT_IGNORE
> 
> In your SDK you can run
> 
> apt-get install debhelper7 cdbs-dh7
> 
> which will automatically remove the old versions,
> which were overwritten by the devkits anyway.
> To restore the old versions use
> 
> apt-get remove debhelper7 cdbs-dh7
> apt-get install debhelper cdbs
> 
> PROBLEM:
> autobuilder should automatically install these build-depends
> but currently it fails with
> 
> The following packages will be REMOVED:
>   debhelper
> The following NEW packages will be installed:
>   bsdmainutils bsdutils debhelper7 groff-base man-db
> E: Packages need to be removed but remove is disabled.
> 
> see the buildlog of a package used for testing the workaround
> https://garage.maemo.org/builder/fremantle/dpkg-repack_1.31maemo1/i386.root.log.FAILED.txt
> 
> Would it be possible to allow package removal in autobuilder?

Interesting approach. I ran into this this weekend trying to use a non-broken cdbs. I did a kludge around it by adding this to debian/control:
Build-Depends: maemo-cflags-cdbs-rules

That got the builder to install the more recent cdbs available in the repo.

-Jeff