Steve's blog

Steinar suggests that he doesn't like cdbs. He's not alone. cdbs may make life easy for the maintainer, but it can make it incredibly difficult for anybody trying to fix bugs and NMU a package. I've found this myself when doing RC bugfixes during the recent round of BSPs; I must admit that more than once I've started looking into a bug only to give up the moment I've seen it uses cdbs.

Fixing packaging errors is much harder when all the details of the package build are hidden from you in a mass of variables and included Makefiles. Unfortunately, it seems quite a number of new inexperienced maintainers have been using cdbs with very little understanding of the magic it does behind the scenes. This doesn't bode well for the quality of their packages in my experience.

17:58 :: # :: /debian/misc :: 2 comments

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Re: aaargh! cdbs...
Ben Armstrong wrote on Tue, 14 Nov 2006 18:57

I agree. That's why in http://syn.theti.ca/articles/2006/07/27/plumbing-the-depths-of-cdbs I found a simple way to explode the makefile and filter the bits I'm interested in.

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