Re: Tips for debugging/testing debian/control Depends/Breaks etc changes?

[Tim Woodall <tim@woodall.me.uk>]

On Wed, 24 Mar 2021, Otto Kek?l?inen wrote:

> Hello!
>
> I've noticed I've spent quite a lot of time debugging various
> situations where the debian/control definitions for
> depends/breaks/replaces/conflicts/provides are not optimal.
>
> The waste of time is two-fold:
>
> 1) apt is not verbose enough
> 2) the cycle to rebuild/tests is too slow
>
> For the problem 2, I hate to rebuild all of the packages (and
> binaries) just because there was a change in debian/control and go
> through the hassle of updating a test repo etc.
>
> I wonder if there is some other "lighter" way to just edit the
> debian/control and produce new binary packages with them updated
> without having to actually build new binary packages (and no, editing
> the .deb files manually and repackaging them with 'ar' is not an
> option that would make life easier).

You'll need to modify it as it is rather tied to my disk layout but I
use the script below to do this. (Not sure if you think this is the same
as repackaging with ar or not)


Basically I create an empty file in patches/sid/<package>.patch

Then run the script ./patch_deb.sh sid

This will create sid/patch/<package> and sid/patch/<package>.orig and
rebuild the package as package_<version>+tjw.deb

Then, to make changes, just edit the files in <package> and rerun it and
it will recreate the patch and rebuild the package.

All of the .orig and patch stuff can obviously be eliminated. I do it
like this because I keep the patches in git and I want the script to be
able to restart from where I got to on a clean checkout.

Regards,

Tim.

#!/bin/bash

DIST=$1

set -xe

for i in patches/${DIST}/*.patch; do

  [[ -f $i ]] || continue

  pkg=${i##*/}
  pkg=${pkg%.patch}

  if [[ ! -d ${DIST}/patch/$pkg ]]; then

    mkdir -p ${DIST}/patch/$pkg/DEBIAN
    mkdir -p ${DIST}/patch/$pkg.orig/DEBIAN

    dpkg -x ${DIST}/packages/pool/${pkg}_*.deb ${DIST}/patch/$pkg
    dpkg -e ${DIST}/packages/pool/${pkg}_*.deb ${DIST}/patch/$pkg/DEBIAN

    dpkg -x ${DIST}/packages/pool/${pkg}_*.deb ${DIST}/patch/$pkg.orig
    dpkg -e ${DIST}/packages/pool/${pkg}_*.deb ${DIST}/patch/$pkg.orig/DEBIAN

    (
      cd ${DIST}/patch/$pkg
      patch -p1 <../../../$i
      sed -i '/^Version:/ { /+tjw$/! s/$/+tjw/ }' DEBIAN/control
    )

  fi

  ( cd ${DIST}/patch/ && diff -urN $pkg.orig $pkg > ../../$i || true )

  dpkg -b ${DIST}/patch/$pkg
  ver=$( sed -n 's/^Version: *//p' ${DIST}/patch/$pkg/DEBIAN/control )
  arch=$( sed -n 's/^Architecture: *//p' ${DIST}/patch/$pkg/DEBIAN/control )
  mv ${DIST}/patch/$pkg.deb ${DIST}/packages/pool/${pkg}_${ver}_${arch}.deb

done

exit 0