Re: ANN: whalebuilder - Debian package builder using Docker

[Jonathan Dowland <jmtd@debian.org>]

Hi, I wrote the below a while ago but never hit send, sorry.

You may also be interested in the Debian Cloud group (debian-cloud@),
and they might be interested in this tool :-)

On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 03:55:09PM -0400, Hubert Chathi wrote:
> I've whipped up a quick script that uses Docker images to build Debian
> packages.  It's basically the same idea as pbuilder/cowbuilder (and was
> inspired by them), but using Docker.
> 
> It's in pretty rough shape still and there's a lot of stuff to do still
> (and lots to learn about Docker and Ruby), but it should be functional
> -- at least enough for other people to bang on it.
> 
> http://www.uhoreg.ca/programming/debian/whalebuilder

Thanks for sharing, I've given it a quick look and here are some
suggestions. 

 • don't use docker's base debian images - they're customised in ways that
   might make package builds 'impure'. I've got some makefiles and dockerfiles
   that one can use to build pristine/unmodified base images at
   <http://github.com/jmtd/debian-docker>.

 • don't install binary package dependencies in the build image by default
   (this might mask a missing build dependency bug)

 • I'd suggest adding --no-install-recommends to apt-get install calls,
   e.g. in Dockerfile.base.erb, to avoid masking a "missing-build-depends"
   bug in source packages (where it relies on a package pulled in from a
   recommendation of a package depended in build-essential)

 • parallel build support (passing DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS through)
   be nice

 • default release should be unstable/sid (since that's the most likely place
   people will be building packages for, normal package lifecycle)


-- 
Jonathan Dowland