Re: A little help getting started?
On Tue, 12 Feb 2013, John Moser wrote:
Hi all.
I've been browsing through some pages on buildd, sbuild, and the like. The
best I can find is the thing on building your own autobuild node[1], but that
seems very specific to integrating with Debian proper. Likewise, it's ... a
mess. Not really concerned with being The Everyman's Guide.
This is kind of bewildering for me. My goal is to configure a setup (locally
on virtual machines) that essentially allows me to auto-build locally in two
modes:
- Pull from Debian
- Insert my own additional packages
Hi John,
Unless I'm misinterpreting what you want to do, I recommend using sbuild /
schroot, and completely forgetting about the buildd package. You should be
able to create the initial build chroots via sbuild-createchroot (or
Ubuntu's mk-sbuild, which is a little fancier), which will let you use
sbuild for package builds.
For automatic builds, it depends on what part you want to automate. Do you
want to automate the process of packaging up your own code? I think that's
best done within whatever existing build infrastructure you have -- my
workplace does this with buildbot, for instance, because that's what we
were using before we got into building Debian packages, but any automated
builder will be equally suitable. (The buildslave is an Ubuntu machine
with schroots set up such that sbuild can work, and the compile process
for Ubuntu is running sbuild to compile the entire product and then
package it, analogous with a call to nmake or xcodebuild or something on
Windows and Mac.)
Do you want to automate the process of applying custom patches on top of
Debian packages? There's some code for this in the Debathena repository
(the "autodebathenificator") that I can write up documentation for if
asked, but in my experience it's only useful for small changes like
configuring with different options, since you'll want to resolve
nontrivial merges by hand anyway.
Do you want to automate creating CDs? You don't need to modify or rebuild
the existing Debian packages, and I'd encourage you not to plan on doing
so until you get as big as Ubuntu and have _outgrown_ the Debian build
network. You can point the CD creation process (whether live-build, or
debian-installer, or something else) at both the Debian apt repo and your
custom repo. As long as your forks of Debian packages have a higher
version number, things will work out.
I don't think a buildd setup is immediately useful for most people
creating derivative distros, if you only have a couple of developers and
are targetting only one-ish architecture and parent distro release.
Let me know if I'm misunderstanding what your goal is.
--
Geoffrey Thomas
http://ldpreload.com
geofft@ldpreload.com
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