Hello everyone.

I'd like to announce a new version of dh_splitpackage.

This version improves documentation to a point where it's rather easy to
get started and use this helper while packaging. A new manual page has
been created with tool description documentation of all the command line
options, configuration file schema, pattern matching extensions and many
examples.


Some additional changes to the actual script made it possible to build
and work on Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 LTS. An Ubuntu PPA with this script is
now available at [1]. In addition to this, a launchpad project has been
registered to simplify development [2]. Finally the source tarball for
the release has been uploaded to pypi [3].


(a copy of the initial announcement)

I wrote dh_splitpackage, a helper script that unambiguously splits the
files of a binary package into multiple packages based on a
configuration file.


The configuration file may point the primary package (the one that gets
leftover files by default) as well as any number of additional packages
with any number of inclusion and exclusion patterns.


The new script can be called instead of dh_install (assuming all the
files you are interested in are already in debian/tmp/) or afterwards.


The biggest advantage compared to existing tools is clear and
not-that-error-prone classification of files to packages. Any file that
would be classified to more than one package (hitting patterns in both
files) is clearly reported and prevents the package from building
properly. In addition running the script displays each file from
debian/tmp and the package it was classified to.


Using this script could greatly simplify many packages that currently
rely on numerous *.install files and custom dh_install overrides in
debian/rules.


Best regards
Zygmunt Krynicki

[1]: https://launchpad.net/~zkrynicki/+archive/dh-splitpackage
[2]: http://launchpad.net/dh-splitpackage
[3]: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/dh_splitpackage/


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Am Samstag, den 04.06.2011, 20:46 +0200 schrieb Zygmunt Krynicki:
> The new script can be called instead of dh_install (assuming all the
> files you are interested in are already in debian/tmp/) or afterwards.

I looked at the man page of dh_splitpackage and compared it to
"dh_install --fail-missing". I found three differences. Please let me
know if there were more.

1. dh_splitpackage complains if a file ends up in more than one binary
package. Having the same file in two binary package leads to a conflict
if you want to install both binary packages. IMO dh_install should do
this check too.

2. dh_splitpackage put files in the primary package if no other install
destination is specified. I would love to see a command line option for
dh_install that does the same. For example, I want to call "dh_install
--put-everything-else-in=vlc-nox" for the daily builds of vlc.

3. dh_splitpackage supports more pattern than dh_install. To name them:
** for matching all directories, [] to match as specific set of
characters. I could live without that, but ** would be nice sometimes.

I think that dh_install could be improved to support all three points
above.

The features of dh_splitpackage are great, but the configuration format
(JSON) seems to be too complex for this use case.

--
Benjamin Drung
Debian & Ubuntu Developer