Re: suggested buildd service

[Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>]

Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org> writes:

> On Sun, May 01, 2005 at 01:10:50PM +0200, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> Shaun Jackman <sjackman@gmail.com> writes:
>> 
>> > Hello,
>> >
>> > How do I use a Debian machine, such as bruckner, to test a source
>> > package by compiling for powerpc? I see bruckner has a sarge chroot.
>> > What's the magic command to start the build in this chroot? I know of
>> > pbuilder -- though I haven't used it much admittedly -- but there is
>> > no pbuilder command in the path.
>> >
>> > Thanks,
>> > Shaun
>> 
>> I've had an idea in mind for quite some time now for just this
>> problem.
>> 
>> It would be nice to have a buildd where maintainer can upload sources
>> for a testbuild and they get a buildd log back (and possibly the
>> packages).
>
> What would be the gain? I can see two reasons why anyone would want to
> build something on a specific architecture: to test autobuilding on that
> architecture, and to fix architecture-specific bugs on one architecture.
>
> For the former, it doesn't really matter which architecture is being
> used; you can test using the experimental buildds as well, or you can
> set up your own buildd environment.
>
> For the latter, having an autobuild doesn't exactly help anyway -- in
> most cases, you need to log in and run tests on the architecture in
> question.

You can add a "cat config.log" or any other number of things to
debian/rules or the Makefile to get a picture of what is going
on. Might not be as comfortable as an interactive session but
possible.

> What would be the benefit of having a buildd that sends build logs to
> the package maintainer that we don't have with any of the currently
> existing systems?

- you can test build one architecture without bothering the others
  (and without setting the source to Arch: <arch> temporarily)
  e.g. to see if a patch for an arch specific bug compiles

- you get exactly the buildd behaviour

- you don't need root to install Build-Depends for the chroot for you
  (and that is the important one imho)

- the build does not fill the buildd admins mailbox or buildd.d.o

- you can build packages that aren't normaly autobuild (if the buildd
  makes the debs available, encrypted witht the DDs key or so)
  e.g. compile a unstable source on stable for a backport

MfG
        Goswin