1 This is the TODO for debhelper. As more and more people use debhelper, this
2 list grows - I welcome patches to fix items on it!
6 * Move the perl libs into the correct perl lib dirs. Makes all debehelper
8 * Make dh_* "use strict".
9 * Make dh_movefiles remove emptied directories after it's moved all the
10 files out of them (#17111).
11 * enhance dh_installmanpages so it associates binaries and man pages and
12 installs the man pages into the correct areas to suit the binaries they
13 document. I may need to make this only happen when a switch is given, to
14 preserve backward compatibility. (#16933, #17061)
15 * maybe make dh_installmanpages look at the .TH line of man pages whose
16 filenames end in .man, to figure out what section they go it. This would
17 require a switch to turn on, for backwards compatibility.
18 * All debhelper programs should be checked that they output files with the
19 correct permissions no matter what the umask is set to. Currently, only
20 those programs that run after dh_fixperms have been so checked. (Checking
21 the rest is low priority, since dh_fixperms fixes any incorrect permissions
22 they might have; still it would be nice to check them too, just to make
23 debhelper more flexible.) One easy fix is to add umask 022 to dh_lib,
24 however, there may be unforeseen ramifications of such a change.
25 * All programs should also make sure the files they install are owned by
26 root.root. Situation is currently the same as with permissions above, plus
27 dh_installchangelogs is fixed.
28 * something should add ldconfig calls properly to the postinst of packages
29 that contain shared libraries. maybe dh_makeshlibs? But it wasn't designed
30 to do that originally, and even worse, it is often run after
31 dh_installdeb, so the fragments wouldn't go into the postinst. So maybe a
32 new script is called for. But it's probably be best to just have a switch
34 * Need a way to make dh_strip not strip any static libs. Also, it'd be nice
35 if there were options to dh_strip, dh_compress, etc, to allow inclusion of
36 directories and exclusion of files based on filename globbing. (Request from
37 Matthias Klose <doko@cs.tu-berlin.de>)
38 * Support use of environment variables in data taken from user, ie, in
39 debian/dirs. The problem with doing this is that we really want to allow
40 any filenames in that input, even those that look like environment
41 variables. However, it may be worth adding a switch to make it parse
42 environment variables. (#20964)
43 * It's possible to speed up debhelper by having it cache some values that
44 multiple commands call. One way to do this would be to write dh_cache,
45 that generates the cache. The catch is that if the user runs that program,
46 they are stating that they don't do anything later to invalidate the cache,
47 without calling ch_cache again. (#23792)
48 * Add a switch to dh_installdeb to allow it to do user defined
49 substitutions. OTOH, maybe it's better if people just sed
50 postinst.in before debhelper gets it's hands on it... (#25235)
51 * objdump -p can get the soname of a library, try using that in dh_shlibs
52 instead of parsing filenames.
53 * to suport foo-doc -> foo symlinks in /usr/share/doc, make
54 dh_installdocs/changelogs check to see if the doc dir is a symlink to a
55 directory. If so, dh_installdocs does not install copyright, and
56 dh_installchangelogs does nothing, but everything else dh_installdocs would
57 do is still done. This means that you need to use dh_link and dh_installdirs
58 to set up the link and directory.
63 - need to wait a reasonable length of
64 time. I'm currently planning on doing this after slink is released or
65 one year after they were deprecated, whichever comes first. Be sure to
66 grep whole debian archive for all of them before removing them, though!
67 - currently, a few packages in potato use dh_du, but bugs have been filed.
68 * Remove support for --number option
69 - only dh_installemacsen ever used it, it is not --priority.
70 * DH_COMPAT 1. Can be removed onve all packages are seen to be using 2 or
71 higher. I won't hold my breath.