docs: Added -rfakeroot to dpkg-buildpackage and simplified

[smoe]

This addresses (at least as a first shot) the issues @rodw-au experienced in #1363 . Many thanks to Rod for his report.

[rodw-au]

Thank you for fixing this. Much appreciated.

[SebKuzminsky]

Typo - should be "Presents".

[smoe]

Done. It unfortunately took me another iteration to recognize that the sentence should start with a capital letter. Also fixed for the following section.

[SebKuzminsky]

Typo.

[SebKuzminsky]

The current (ie before this PR) build instructions work for me without -rfakeroot on latest master, b58e0b6. There must be something about this problem that i'm not understanding.

[rodw-au]

Others reported the same and I was able to create the debs without -rfakeroot on my chromebook that had not been building the debs previously. I had been building the debs on a regular basis on Debian 11 on my production machine for about a month until it failed with some kind of permissions issue when I raised issue #1363. I suspect the issue may have been caused by a conflict with permissions on files that had been created in a previous build.
I did observe a number of commits in relation to the .deb build process in the few days before I observed the issue so I assumed something had changed. I was able to build the debs when logged in as root.

[rodw-au]

I wonder if its because my user and root have different passwords?
I usually always make the root password and user password identical but I didn't on this build.

[SebKuzminsky]

I wonder if its because my user and root have different passwords?

That shouldn't matter.

[phillc54]

I haven't noticed any issues without -rfakeroot either.

[smoe]

That is weird. Could it be the version of Debian that makes the difference? I am building on Debian unstable, which should be mostly equivalent to bookworm (version 12). I am not sure about what is the right thing to do, but since -rfakeroot with uttermost confidence does not do any harm (that is how packages were always built not too long ago) and with just a bit less of a confidence someone else will go through the same pain like @rodw-au , I suggest to just add it.

[smoe]

@petterreinholdtsen , does this ring a bell?

[phillc54]

I build on both MX-Linux19 (a Debian10 spinoff) and MX-Linux21 (a Debian11 spinoff)

[petterreinholdtsen]

[Steffen Möller]

@petterreinholdtsen , does this ring a bell?

I suspect the handing of Rules-Requires-Root, which is fairly recent in Debian, might be related. Personally I use 'debuild' from devscripts, which insert fakeroot when needed, so I never have to add fakeroot settings manually.

…

-- Happy hacking Petter Reinholdtsen

[smoe]

[Steffen Möller]
@petterreinholdtsen , does this ring a bell?

I suspect the handing of Rules-Requires-Root, which is fairly recent in Debian, might be related. Personally I use 'debuild' from devscripts, which insert fakeroot when needed, so I never have to add fakeroot settings manually.

@SebKuzminsky , I suggest to then go for the -rfakeroot.

[SebKuzminsky]

It's a bit hard to tell from the bug report since it does not specify which git commits built and which failed, but my hunch is that @rodw-au 's build problem stems not from problems with the build instructions or with the contents of the git repo, but from root-owned files being accidentally created and later not being able to remove/clean those files as a non-root user.

I don't want to train our users to add fakeroot (or worse, su) where it's not needed. So the updates to the docs that add -r fakeroot should be removed imo.

I do like the updates to the build docs that simplify running debian/configure instead of cd debian; ./configure; cd ... Please leave those in.

With that change (and maybe a change to the title of the PR) I think it will be ready to merge.

[petterreinholdtsen]

Note, this patch is partly made obsolete by #1835 . I strongly recommend rewriting the documentation to use 'debuild' instead of introducing -rfakeroot, as it is a more high level tool doing more quality checking automatically.

[smoe]

Too outdated to chase this all up.