Iustin Pop/ blog/ entry/ pbuilder and binary-arch packages

Just got bitten by this, so note to self:

  • the pbuilder image might have installed iproute automatically, due to isc-dhcp-client dependency, so it's not an entirely clean build environment
  • if you have a source package which generates both an arch:any and an arch:all package, make sure to test building “all” packages and only the binary one(s), via pbuilder --binary-arch; otherwise you might get surprises due to Build-Depends-Indep being pulled in by default

Yes, I'm talking about Debian bug #671981. Fun!

more packages is not unclean
Too many packages only make a chroot non-minimal not non-clean. Please reserve "clean" for what it means: a environment suiteable for building packages.
Comment by Anonymous — at lunch time on Wednesday, May 9th, 2012
comment 2

cowbuilder --debootstrapopts --variant=buildd

But too many packages is unclean.

Comment by Anonymous — Wednesday afternoon, May 9th, 2012
Re: comments

Anyonymous 1: I beg to differ. I use pbuilder to ensure that my build-depends are correct; if it fails at that, it's not just "non-minimal", it's actually broken for my purpose. So yes, I consider a non-minimal chroot as "unclean".

Anonymous 2: ah, --variant buildd. I should try that with pbuilder (when re-creating the chroots), it sounds like a good idea, thanks!

Comment by Iustin Pop — late Wednesday evening, May 9th, 2012
Re: Re: comments

Too many packages installed means it might not be suiteable to be checking build depdencies completely. (But note that generating a really minimal build environment is hard, you usually get some unneeded packages like apt and the like).

But unclean originally means a build environment where failing to build a package does not mean it is no bug in the package. (Which is not the case with too many packages installed).

Comment by Anonymous — mid-morning Friday, May 11th, 2012
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