Most people (at least those who hear me shouting on irc) probably know that I’m not a fan of cdbs. While working on geoclue, which builds a lot of binary packages I realized, that cdbs wastes an insane amount of time by calling dh_* for every single package. One of the reasons geoclue uses cdbs is that the maintainer likes the short debian/rules file. We’ll, compare yourself:
cdbs:
#!/usr/bin/make -f # -*- makefile -*- # Uncomment this to turn on verbose mode. #export DH_VERBOSE=1 include /usr/share/cdbs/1/rules/patchsys-quilt.mk include /usr/share/cdbs/1/rules/debhelper.mk include /usr/share/cdbs/1/class/autotools.mk include /usr/share/cdbs/1/rules/utils.mk common-binary-predeb-arch:: list-missing clean:: rm -f providers/gypsy/Makefile rm -rf debian/tmp
Build time: dpkg-buildpackage -B 132.20s user 41.52s system 90% cpu 3:11.13 total
dh(1):
#!/usr/bin/make -f # -*- makefile -*- include /usr/share/quilt/quilt.make build: $(QUILT_STAMPFN) build-stamp build-stamp: dh build touch $@ %: dh $@ clean: clean-patched unpatch clean-patched: dh clean rm -f providers/gypsy/Makefile rm -f build-stamp .PHONY: patch unpatch clean clean-patched build
Build time: dpkg-buildpackage -B 85.63s user 32.91s system 91% cpu 2:08.91 total
So cdbs wasted about one minute of time using a 2.4 GHz Intel Core2Duo. I’m wondering how much more time it takes on slow architectures like mips(el) and arm(el). One more argument against the unmaintaible mess of makefiles called cdbs.