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...
Erich wrote on Wed, 15 Nov 2006 15:04

I have to disagree.

More than once I've given up on the chaotic debian/rules of a package I couldn't decyper and instead converted it to CDBS to apply my fixes. I was able to convert 400k of custom Makefiles to a 5 line CDBS file. Thats a lot easier to work with for third parties.

At least if you know how CDBS works, and there is no bug in CDBS itself.

So please DON'T do your own magic, if you could *reuse* the magic that has been put into CDBS (and at a lower level, debhelper).

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