Building in chroots (was: Successful and unsuccessful Debian development tools)

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

md@Linux.IT (Marco d'Itri) wrote:

> On Aug 01, Eduard Bloch <edi@gmx.de> wrote:
>
>> > > Also, pbuilder and debootstrap are considered absolutely critical for
>> > > serious work.
>> > That's a bold statement.
>> Are you serious? (SCNR ;-)
> Yes. I do not use either and I think I have been doing serious Debian
> work so far.
> Building in chroots *hides* bugs.

Of course.  However, not building in chroots also hides bugs.  Why do
you think it's better to build in a chroot?

I think a package should be built on the developer's system (which,
hopefully, is a typical example for the environment were the package
will be used and built), and in a clean chroot.  It should be tested (in
the sense of: Can it be installed?  Does it run at all?) in a chroot,
and also on the developer's system.  Of course the amount of testing
needed depends on the extent of the changes.

But not testing at all in a clean environment isn't a good idea, at
least with the packages that I work with.  In particular because I
frequently have locally changed configuration files, which may hide some
bugs, too.

Regards, Frank

-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)