I’m trying to create a #Debian package for @objfw and it’s really a big mess. I want to have the same structure as on Fedora, which is a meta package that depends on the subpackages. But I cannot find any documentation on how to do that in Debain other than that debian/control should list them all. Ok, that’s easy. But it doesn’t document how to specify which file goes into which package. Nothing. Nada. RPM? Just look for %files, all neatly documented. OK, so after googling around, you find dh_movefiles. Ah, but that’s deprecated! OK, supposedly I need to use dh_install. Let’s look at the documentation of that. Nothing that mentions packages! So in the end, I do trial and error. And just doing dh_install usr/bin/foo foo/usr/bin doesn’t work. But dh_install usr/bin/foo ../foo/usr/bin does! Is that correct or a hack? I don’t know! Debian won’t tell me!

Dear #Debian developers. Your entire packaging system seems to be multiple layers of wrappers around old and horrible things, trying to hide them, but without documenting anything. Please get your documentation in order. Have a look at how Fedora and RPM are documented and learn from it.

Also, for the love of god, please consider using some version control system such as Git, so that it becomes easy to see changes, see what other packages did and learn from them. That would have helped me immensely with seeing how other packages solved that Debian’s custom tooling is too old and chokes on binaries generated by clang because of new debug symbols.

I’ve packaged @objfw for all the BSDs, Alpine, ArchLinux, Fedora, OpenIndiana, MSYS2 and many more and no other experience was nearly as bad as Debian.

PS: And in the end, I’m still stuck, because apparently something doesn’t like the Depends: on one of the other packages built from the same source. And I have no idea why. No useful error message or anything.