This documentation will briefly summarize how to build packages. At the time of writing this, we focused on packages for Debian etch and lenny in i386 and amd64 variants.

Setting up pbuilder environment

Install needed packages

To be able to build packages you need to install a few packages from the repositories:

apt-get install pbuilder fakeroot

Additionally, you need to get the LATEST version of debootstrap from Debian and install it manually. At the time of writing this, these steps were needed:

1. The page showed that the latest version was 1.0.10 (lenny), following that link one got to the package summary page
2. On that page there is a link to the download page (table at the bottom), follow it!
3. Download from one of the mirrors, e.g. http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/debootstrap/debootstrap_1.0.10_all.deb: wget -q http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/debootstrap/debootstrap_1.0.10_all.deb
4. Install this package via dpkg -i debootstrap_1.0.10_all.deb

Prepare build environment

In this example we use /local/build as our build location. Our configuration files (attached to this page, see below) already reflect this.

Please run the following commands:

export BUILD_PLACE=/local/build
make -p $BUILD_PLACE
cd $BUILD_PLACE
mkdir aptcache base build config result source

Create build environments

Creating the initial build environments is easy, usually this should only be run once:

cd $BUILD_PLACE; for i in `ls config`; do pbuilder create --configfile config/$i; done

Update build environments

It seems that this is necessary quite often (especially when you first build a package which is then needed by another package). To do that you need a hook "D70localdebs". Just create a script in your hook directory and chmod it to be executable.

#!/bin/bash
LOCALPATH="where_you_store_your_debs"
echo "HOOK D70 update pckages... $LOCALPATH"
cd $LOCALPATH
/usr/bin/dpkg-scanpackages . /dev/null > $LOCALPATH/Packages
echo "deb file://$LOCALPATH/ ./" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update

It is up to you to use local paths or local repository (reprepro).

reprepro

I assume that the repository goes into /srv/repository.

• Install reprepro: aptitude install reprepro
• mkdir -p /srv/repository/conf
• create file /srv/repository/conf/destributions (maybe the "experimental" branch is not needed)

Codename: etch
Label: etch
Architectures: i386 amd64 source all
Components: contrib
DebIndices: Packages Release .bz2 .gz .
DscIndices: Sources Release . .gz .bz2
Contents: .bz2 .gz .
Description: Special packages (mostly LSC related) for Debian Etch 4.0

Codename: etch-experimental
Label: etch-experimental
Architectures: i386 amd64 source all
Components: contrib
DebIndices: Packages Release .bz2 .gz .
DscIndices: Sources Release . .gz .bz2
Contents: .bz2 .gz .
Description: Special packages (mostly LSC related) for Debian Etch 4.0 which are considered experimental

Codename: lenny
Label: lenny
Architectures: i386 amd64 source all
Components: contrib
DebIndices: Packages Release .bz2 .gz .
DscIndices: Sources Release . .gz .bz2
Contents: .bz2 .gz .
Description: Special packages (mostly LSC related) for Debian Lenny 5.0

Codename: lenny-experimental
Label: lenny-experimental
Architectures: i386 amd64 source all
Components: contrib
DebIndices: Packages Release .bz2 .gz .
DscIndices: Sources Release . .gz .bz2
Contents: .bz2 .gz .
Description: Special packages (mostly LSC related) for Debian Lenny 5.0 which are considered experimental

• To add libmetaio to the repository to "etch" run reprepro -b /srv/repository/ include etch /tmp/libmetaio*changes

if the build goes wrong

If unfortunately something goes wrong, you may want to enter a shell instead of loging out and cleaning the build directory. For that you need another hook "C10shell".

#!/bin/bash
echo "HOOK C10shell - build fails - execute shell..."
apt-get install -y --force-yes vim less bash
cd /tmp/buildd/*/debian/..
/bin/bash < /dev/tty > /dev/tty 2> /dev/tty

TODO

• FIX (TBT): http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/05/msg00550.html
• FIX: It is advisable to add DEBBUILDOPTS="-sa" to ensure that the sources are also included in .changes

-- CarstenAulbert - 20 Aug 2008