Admin Stuff

Lately I have been hacking around with pbuilder. Here I collect some information:

• With no amount of hacking or tweaking was I able to get pbuilder-uml to work
• Same for fakechroot
• After taking almost a day to build an ubuntu-dapper chroot under debian etch I found out, that the currently unstable debootstrap has support for ubuntu !! A simple backport to etch and that's it.
• pbuilder (on debian etch) also can make use of the ubuntu scripts, if you change the bootstrap method from cdebootstrap to debootstrap. You also need to explicitly specify the MIRRORSITE (and possibly COMPONENTS) parameters (however, COMPONENTS is only available when packporting the currently unstable pbuilder to etch)
• Since pbuilder reads the users (!) .pbuilderrc even if started with sudo, and since this file is a fully powerful shell script, it is not securely possible to allow an (untrusted) user to run pbuilder via sudo.

Configuring pbuilder for building multiple distributions

I have setup my pbuilder so I can build packages for ubuntu dapper, ubuntu gutsy and debian etch by simply setting an environment variable:

 $ sudo env DIST=gutsy pbuilder --build libsenf_0.0r702.dsc

This setup is achieved by simply placing the following into my ~/.pbuilderrc (not root's !):

if [ -z "$DIST" ]; then
        echo
        echo "Environment variable '\$DIST' not set"
        echo
        exit 1
fi

BASETGZ=/var/cache/pbuilder/$DIST.tgz
BUILDRESULT=/var/cache/pbuilder/result/$DIST
APTCACHE=/var/cache/pbuilder/aptcache/$DIST
BINDMOUNTS=$BUILDRESULT
OTHERMIRROR="deb file:$BUILDRESULT ./"
DISTRIBUTION=$DIST
TIMEOUT_TIME=""
EXTRAPACKAGES="gnupg"

case "$DIST" in
gutsy|dapper)
        MIRRORSITE=http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/
        COMPONENTS="main universe"
        ;;
*) ;;
esac

Setting up the build-roots

With above configuration, the build-roots can easily be configured:

To add the keyfile to the build root's, I have done (I used the same key for all repositories):

 $ dist=gutsy
 $ result=/var/cache/pbuilder/result
 $ sudo mkdir $result/$dist
 $ sudo cp $result/etch/{update.sh,archive.key} $result/$dist
 $ sudo $result/$dist/update.sh
 $ sudo env DIST=$dist pbuilder --create
 $ echo -e '#!/bin/sh\napt-key add -' >run.sh
 $ sudo env DIST=$dist pbuilder --execute --save-after-exec run.sh <$result/archive.key
 $ rm run.sh
 $ sudo env DIST=$dist pbuilder --update

The configuration above already adds the packages built using the pbuilder available to the pbuilder to satisfy further build depends (see OTHERMIRROR and BINDMOUNTS setting). For this to work, I have setup each of the result directories as a debian repository (see SettingUpASimpleDebianRepository).

Before new packages are used by the pbuilder, you need to update the repository meta-data and need to update the build-root:

 $ sudo /var/cache/pbuilder/gutsy/update.sh
 $ sudo env DIST=gutsy pbuilder --update