Re: debian-policy: please document build profiles
> Quoting Javier Serrano Polo (2016-07-10 19:25:59)
> > There is an introduction at https://bugs.debian.org/830524 . The goal is
> > to build a subset of binary packages. For instance, the linux source
> > package should have a way to build only linux-image-4.6.0-1-686 (profile
> > pkg.linux.686), only linux-image-4.6.0-1-rt-686-pae (profile
> > pkg.linux.rt-686-pae), etc. The nodebug profile would be useful to not
> > build *-dbg packages.
> ...
> It seems that you want to build *single* binary packages only? Why?
> Is there a reduction in compilation time that you want for debugging
> and testing purposes?
Certainly it is very annoying that building src:linux takes a very
long time even if only a small subset of its outputs are wanted. This
is not relevant only for debugging, but can also be relevant for tasks
like security response: if I want to locally apply an emergency fix
for a 0day I would like to do it ASAP, with a build only for my
running kernel(s), without having to wait for lots of other flavours
to build.
But is this goal really best achieved with build profiles ?
Perhaps a better answer would be a build option or other env var
passed through dpkg-buildpackage. That is, an entirely generic
option, which affects all builds, and says "build only these binary
packages".
With that,
* dpkg-genchanges could avoid including extranous .debs even if
the source package needlessly builds them
* no problems with build profile cleanness arise
* there is no need to try to encode binary package patterns in
build profile names (which is not really how the build profile
system is supposed to be used)
* actually not doing unecessary work becomes an optimisation
Ian.
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