Bug#1061111: RFS: dpkg-buildenv/1.0.0 [ITP] -- Builds debian packages in a docker container.

On Thu, Jan 18, 2024 at 9:04 PM Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues <josch@debian.org> wrote:

Hi Aidan,

On Thu, 18 Jan 2024 16:52:26 +0100 Andrey Rakhmatullin <wrar@wrar.name> wrote:
> I see you added this tool to the list of similar tools on the wiki so you
> at least know about that list. So how is your tool better than other tools
> on that list, or at least than the ones packaged in Debian?
> Please also note that if you followed the procedure outlined at
> https://mentors.debian.net/intro-maintainers/ and filed an ITP bug before
> doing the packaging this discussion would happen there, not on the RFS bug.

Unlike other tools, dpkg-buildenv provides a complete dockerfile (https://github.com/aidan-gallagher/dpkg-buildenv/blob/main/dpkg-buildenv/Dockerfile) which describes the environment setup.

This makes it easy to integrate with other tools such as Jenkins (https://github.com/aidan-gallagher/dpkg-buildenv/blob/main/dpkg-buildenv/Documentation/using-with-jenkins.md) and VSCode (https://github.com/aidan-gallagher/dpkg-buildenv/blob/main/dpkg-buildenv/Documentation/using-with-vscode.md).

By integrating the Dockerfile with your Continuous Integration System (Jenkins), it means the Jenkin's & developer's environment is guaranteed to be the exact same.

I've written about the benefits of that here: https://aidangallagher.co.uk/articles/continuous-integration-pipeline/.

The ability to run the Jenkins workload within a container is the reason I started the work.

I'm the current maintainer of sbuild. You found the wiki page and you saw that
there already exist 10 different implementations of utilities that build Debian
packages inside a docker container. You still decided to add an eleventh
implementation so I guess my plea here will not amount to much but anyways here
goes my sales pitch:

If you want your code to be in Debian, please consider reviewing the patch
attached to this bug report:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=867176

I'm not a docker user, so I cannot verify whether this is indeed doing the
right thing but you are, so it should be easy for you to take it, test it and
finalize it.

I'm afraid contributing to an existing tool is not as sexy as supplying one
that is 100% written by you but I can guarantee you that if you can clean up
that patch, I will apply it to sbuild and your code will be in Debian proper.

Maybe, hopefully we can make sbuilder and/or pbuilder work with docker instead
of having eleven competing implementations doing the same thing?

Thanks!

cheers, josch

Thank you for taking the time to reply.

I shall have a look at sbuild and that patch however I am not familiar with Perl and I imagine the sbuild implementation will be relatively more complicated than dpkg-buildenv.