debhelper/cdbs/dpkg/yada/yada

In response to Colin/Gergely:

If dpkg had had something cdbs-ish or debhelper-ish built into it from the beginning, we would have neither cdbs or debhelper, but probably a poor imitation, like the crap that is in rpm. The world would be a poorer place.

Of course there might be a few less grossly bloated debian/rules files out there, but I'd not count on it. And we'd not have had debstd or yada, so it would not be entirely a bad thing.

Colin's comments about how interconnected and, dare I say, fragile cdbs is are not reassuring. I remember similar problems with the system I wrote before debhelper, which used one common debian/rules and a short debian/config for all my packages. That's one of the reasons I ditched it for debhelper. Hope you have better luck with cdbs.