(debian-policy.info)debian/rules and DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS

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4.9.1 ‘debian/rules’ and ‘DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS’
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Supporting the standardized environment variable ‘DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS’ is
recommended.  This variable can contain several flags to change how a
package is compiled and built.  Each flag must be in the form flag or
flag=options.  If multiple flags are given, they must be separated by
whitespace.  (1) flag must start with a lowercase letter (‘a-z’) and
consist only of lowercase letters, numbers (‘0-9’), and the characters
‘-’ and ‘_’ (hyphen and underscore).  options must not contain
whitespace.  The same tag should not be given multiple times with
conflicting values.  Package maintainers may assume that
‘DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS’ will not contain conflicting tags.

The meaning of the following tags has been standardized:

‘nocheck’

     This tag says to not run any build-time test suite provided by the
     package.

‘nodoc’

     This tag says to skip any build steps that only generate package
     documentation.  Files required by other sections of Debian Policy,
     such as copyright and changelog files, must still be generated and
     put in the package, but other generated documentation such as
     help2man-generated pages, Doxygen-generated API documentation, or
     info pages generated from Texinfo sources should be skipped if
     possible.  This option does not change the set of binary packages
     generated by the source package, but documentation-only binary
     packages may be nearly empty when built with this option.

‘noopt’

     The presence of this tag means that the package should be compiled
     with a minimum of optimization.  For C programs, it is best to add
     ‘-O0’ to ‘CFLAGS’ (although this is usually the default).  Some
     programs might fail to build or run at this level of optimization;
     it may be necessary to use ‘-O1’, for example.

‘nostrip’

     This tag means that the debugging symbols should not be stripped
     from the binary during installation, so that debugging information
     may be included in the package.

‘parallel=n’

     This tag means that the package should be built using up to ‘n’
     parallel processes if the package build system supports this.  (2)
     If the package build system does not support parallel builds, this
     string must be ignored.  If the package build system only supports
     a lower level of concurrency than n, the package should be built
     using as many parallel processes as the package build system
     supports.  It is up to the package maintainer to decide whether the
     package build times are long enough and the package build system is
     robust enough to make supporting parallel builds worthwhile.

‘terse’

     This tag means that the package build will be less verbose than
     default.  For example, ‘debian/rules’ might pass options to the
     package’s configure script that cause the compiler to produce less
     output.

Unknown flags must be ignored by ‘debian/rules’.

The following makefile snippet is an example of how one may implement
the build options; you will probably have to massage this example in
order to make it work for your package.

     CFLAGS = -Wall -g
     INSTALL = install
     INSTALL_FILE    = $(INSTALL) -p    -o root -g root  -m  644
     INSTALL_PROGRAM = $(INSTALL) -p    -o root -g root  -m  755
     INSTALL_SCRIPT  = $(INSTALL) -p    -o root -g root  -m  755
     INSTALL_DIR     = $(INSTALL) -p -d -o root -g root  -m  755

     ifneq (,$(filter noopt,$(DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS)))
         CFLAGS += -O0
     else
         CFLAGS += -O2
     endif
     ifeq (,$(filter nostrip,$(DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS)))
         INSTALL_PROGRAM += -s
     endif
     ifneq (,$(filter parallel=%,$(DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS)))
         NUMJOBS = $(patsubst parallel=%,%,$(filter parallel=%,$(DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS)))
         MAKEFLAGS += -j$(NUMJOBS)
     endif

     build:
             # ...
     ifeq (,$(filter nocheck,$(DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS)))
             # Code to run the package test suite.
     endif

   ---------- Footnotes ----------

   (1) Some packages support any delimiter, but whitespace is the
easiest to parse inside a makefile and avoids ambiguity with flag values
that contain commas.

   (2) Packages built with ‘make’ can often implement this by passing
the ‘-j’n option to ‘make’.