I've noticed that BDIR is not respected. For example if I change it in
the Makefile (I prefer $CODENAME-$ARCH), the build fails when it gets to
tools/start_new_disc as that script has it's own hard coded value for
BDIR instead of using the one exported by Makefile.

To make things even more interesting the use of the build directory cd
variable is inconsistent across the some of the scripts that set it.

Makefile:78:BDIR=$(TDIR)/$(CODENAME)
tools/add-bin-doc:6:BDIR=$TDIR/$CODENAME
tools/create_control:28:BDIR=$TDIR/$CODENAME-$ARCH
tools/make_disc_trees.pl:85:my $bdir = "$tdir/$codename";
tools/make_disc_trees.pl:866:        open(AP_LOG, ">>
$tdir/$codename/add_packages.log")
tools/sort_deps:34:my $dir = "$ENV{'TDIR'}/$ENV{'CODENAME'}";
tools/sort_deps_edu:36:my $dir = "$ENV{'TDIR'}/$ENV{'CODENAME'}";
tools/start_new_disc:20:BDIR=$TDIR/$CODENAME

As a side issue, what was SDIR ever used for? I can't find it referenced
anywhere.

tools/add-bin-doc:7:SDIR=$TDIR/$CODENAME

Removed it.

I haven't changed tools/create_control as update-cd seems to be the only
script that uses it and update-cd does not set BDIR.

Bonus, the following error message gets fixed as the path was wrong:

tools/make_disc_trees.pl:867:            || die "Can't write in
$tdir/add_packages.log!\n";

I hope the attached patch file is satisfactory.

Hi Robert,

Hmmm, OK. BDIR is only ever expected to be a temporary directory
within TDIR (as you'll see from the code below). I'd be happier just
to remove mention of it and let scripts do their own thing, to be
honest.

Well, they're consistent *except* for create_control, which is only
ever used by update-cd (as you noted below). That's a special case.

It's a leftover from old days, back when we used to build source CDs
in the same run as binary CDs

I'm not going to take the patch right now, I'll look at this again
after we release Wheezy this weekend. I'm just about to upload the
last version of debian-cd ready to go into the release.

Hi Steve,

Is there anything I can do to help further with this bug?

Hi Robert,

Thanks for prodding me. As you can probably guess, I'd totally
forgotten about this. :-/

Looking again...