Recording this in the BTS so it doesn't get lost.
----- Forwarded message from "Matt T. Proud" <khanreaper@nerp.net> -----

From: "Matt T. Proud" <khanreaper@nerp.net>
Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2006 12:56:24 -0500 (CDT)
To: joey@kitenet.net, joeyh@debian.org
Cc: khanreaper@nerp.net, sys@ima.umn.edu
Subject: Patch Submission for Debhelper
Reply-To: khanreaper@nerp.net
User-Agent: SquirrelMail/1.4.5

Hello Joey,

I have taken a liking to your Debhelper build tools, so I wrote a little
patch for it that reflects some further needs of a place where I work. It
probably won't have too much use with mainstream package developers, but
it proves to be incredibly useful in custom situations, particularly where
one is writing a package to override a lot of things provided by other
packages, such as custom settings propagation, etc.

Given how harmless this extension is and how much I use it, I would
request that you incorporate it into Debhelper. Even though we are using
Ubuntu, I requested that you include this instead of Ubuntu based upon
<http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/on_forking_debhelper.html>.

The long and short of what it provides is this: A new script called
dh_divert. What dh_divert is that it looks at the contents of
debian/diverts and debian/purgediverts and instructs the preinst and
postrm scripts to create and remove diversions. Debian/diverts' diversions
are removed upon "postrm remove," and debian/purgediverts are removed upon
"postrm purge."

I am not a Perl guru, but I based what I wrote off of other Debhelper
utilities, so the code shouldn't be too foul.

Please let me know what you think. If it seems unlikely for you to
incorporate this, please tell me; but it would certainly make my life a
lot easier if you were to, as that would remove my need for maintaining a
custom , in-house version of Debhelper to use with my organization's
development tool set.

Attached is a patch of my work against the Subversion checkout from 20060826

Best,

Matt

----- End forwarded message -----

Hi,

debhelper 13.1 introduced dh_installalternatives (wonderful, thanks a
lot!). it would be nice if debhelper could support divertions in the
same way, via debian/foo.divert or so.

Given that dh_installalternatives is there already, this seems like an
easy way to "copy&paste" this to a dh_installdivert. If you'd like me to
prepare a patch for this, I'm happy to do so.. just let me know which
name the helper should have.

Regards,
Daniel