debian/rake: Ruby DH Sequencing?

In my previous post I looked at the possibility of using rake, a Ruby build tool, instead of make to write debian/rules files. While that turned out to not be entirely impossible as far as the core dpkg-* utilities used to build Debian packages are concerned, wiring it up with the debhelper ‘dh’ command sequencer appears unfortunately impossible without changes to dh itself.

Clearly the solution here is to write our own sequencer in Ruby! To do that we will first have to understand what a sequencer does though.

debian/rake: A Tale of Rubies

A while ago Rohan and I talked about the possibility of writing debian/rules in ruby rather than make. Even though this is not exactly policy compliant I was reasonably certain that this is possible, I just was not quite sure how much resistance the existing tools would give a rules file that is not written in make. So, I set out to hack up a debian/rules file using rake (a make-like build tool using ruby).