I spent today hacking on bzr-builddeb for the first time in a while. The first order of business was to review and merge all of the proposed merges in launchpad. Thanks especially to Jelmer Vernooij for all his work.
After that I tackled a long-standing annoyance in bzr-builddeb. This limitation made it difficult to pass extra options to the underlying build command. For instance, when building a merge you must use the -v option to debuild. Previously this meant that you would have to run something like:
$ bzr builddeb -S --builder "debuild -S -v0.1-1"
Using the tradition of -- to end option parsing this now becomes:
$ bzr builddeb -- -S -v0.1-1
which is much better.
The -- isn't exactly obvious, but it does mean that I don't have to implement support for every option of dpkg-buildpackage.
It may be possible to add support in bzr to make this work without the --, I haven't looked yet, and the current implementation doesn't prevent us from doing that.
One other thing I did was to make the build command default to debuild, rather than dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -uc -us, so that we get all the debuild goodness. The obvious change here will be that it tries to sign the package when you build. You can define your builder to be debuild -uc -us to avoid this.
One last break was to remove support for source-builder from the configuration. It now assumes that adding -S to the build command will make it build a source package.
Comments on any of this are welcome.