programs in debhelper use pairs of files and destinations or slightly more
complicated formats.
-Note that if a package is the first (or only) binary package listed in
-F<debian/control>, debhelper will use F<debian/foo> if no F<debian/package.foo>
-file can be found.
+Note for the first (or only) binary package listed in
+F<debian/control>, debhelper will use F<debian/foo> when there's no
+F<debian/package.foo> file.
In some rare cases, you may want to have different versions of these files
for different architectures or OSes. If files named debian/I<package>.foo.I<ARCH>
"B<dpkg-architecture -qDEB_HOST_ARCH_OS>",
then they will be used in preference to other, more general files.
-In many cases, these config files are used to specify various types of
+Mostly, these config files are used to specify lists of various types of
files. Documentation or example files to install, files to move, and so on.
When appropriate, in cases like these, you can use standard shell wildcard
characters (B<?> and B<*> and B<[>I<..>B<]> character classes) in the files.
-
You can also put comments in these files; lines beginning with B<#> are
ignored.
+The syntax of these files is intentionally kept very simple to make then
+easy to read, understand, and modify. If you prefer power and complexity,
+you can make the file executable, and write a program that outputs
+whatever content is appropriate for a given situation. When you do so,
+the output is not further processed to expand wildcards or strip comments.
+
=head1 SHARED DEBHELPER OPTIONS
The following command line options are supported by all debhelper programs.
=item -
+B<dh_strip> compresses debugging symbol files to reduce the installed
+size of -dbg packages.
+
+=item -
+
B<dh_auto_configure> does not include the source package name
in --libexecdir when using autoconf.
environment variables listed by B<dpkg-buildflags>, unless
they are already set. They support DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noopt too.
+=item -
+
+B<dh_auto_configure> passes CFLAGS to perl F<Makefile.PL> and
+F<Build.PL>
+
+=item -
+
+B<dh_strip> puts separated debug symbols in a location based on their
+build-id.
+
+=item -
+
+Executable debconf config files are run and their output used as the
+configuration.
+
=back
=back