Re: Moving debian/* to non-standard location

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

Hi!

On Sat, 2012-09-08 at 16:51:16 -0700, Kip Warner wrote:
> This is no doubt going to cause concern with some folks, but I'd like to
> know if it is feasible for a package maintainer to use a non-standard
> location for the usual debian related packaging files. For instance, the
> usual location for the packaging makefile is debian/rules in the root,
> but it would be nice if in my project's repository I could use...
> 
> Packaging/Debian/rules

This is not really supported (or at least not generally tested), and
there's probably a ton of software with the assumption that the
directory and companion files are located in the topdir of the
source tree.

You still might (?) be able to concoct a command-line invokation to
dpkg-buildpackage that passes enough information to the inferior dpkg
tools so that the packaging can be relocated. Stuff like -R for
dpkg-buildpackage; -c, -l, -T, -f for dpkg-genchanges via
--changes-option, etc, etc. I don't think debhelper might be happy
with the new path though.

But then it might be just easier to install the packaging files into
the expected place at source distribution time («make dist» in
autotools parlance) through a “dist hook” for example.

I realize the rpm spec files might seem like being advantageous on
this, but then it's usually not recommended to have packaging on the
upstream tree, and an even “easier” way might be to just stick the
packaging in its own branch on the source repository, which would
then not clutter your normal project tree.

thanks,
guillem