Plan

CDBS is unmaintained. debhelper and debputy are better for common cases.

There is one exception: Haskell with it's ~1000 source package build-depending on CDBS

The plan would consist to strip-out features not needed by Haskell team and the later give maintenance of CDBS to Haskell team.

Modules to remove:

""haskell-devscripts-minimal"" could for example provides a virtual ""cdbs"" with only the /usr/share/cdbs/1/rules/debhelper.mk file

stats on Haskell monorepo

tchet@quieter:~/deb/DHG_packages/p$ wc -l */debian/rules | grep -v total | awk '{print $1}' | sort -k1n | uniq -c
     18 3
    226 4
     33 5
    240 6
    138 7
    199 8
    179 9
     38 10
     42 11
     15 12
      9 13
      8 14
     11 15
      3 16
      4 17
      2 18
      3 19
      3 20
      3 21
      2 22
      1 23
      1 24
      1 25
      1 26
      1 27
      1 28
      2 34
      1 38
      1 45
      1 100
      1 436

tchet@quieter:~/deb/DHG_packages/p$ cat  */debian/rules  | grep cdbs | sort | uniq -c
   1184 include /usr/share/cdbs/1/class/hlibrary.mk
      1 include /usr/share/cdbs/1/rules/autoreconf.mk
      3 include /usr/share/cdbs/1/rules/buildvars.mk
   1184 include /usr/share/cdbs/1/rules/debhelper.mk
      1 include /usr/share/cdbs/1/rules/utils.mk
      1 # Largely rewritten for cdbs and hlibrary.mk by Iain Lane in 2009.
      1 # Largely rewritten for cdbs and hlibrary.mk by Joachim Breitner in 2009.

Note

In the end it would be the other way around 

cat /usr/share/cdbs/1/class/hlibrary.mk | grep inc
# - get this included in the cdbs package once this gets mature enough (maybe?)