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Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/pbuilder-doc.xml')
| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/pbuilder-doc.xml | 93 |
1 files changed, 90 insertions, 3 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/pbuilder-doc.xml b/Documentation/pbuilder-doc.xml index 63dbd9d..b2e3cdd 100644 --- a/Documentation/pbuilder-doc.xml +++ b/Documentation/pbuilder-doc.xml @@ -2,17 +2,23 @@ <!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.2//EN" "docbookx.dtd"> <!-- the original of this documentation is in pbuilder source tarball --> <book> - <title>pbuilder User's manual</title> + <title>pbuilder User's Manual</title> <chapter> <title>Introducing pbuilder</title> <sect1> <title>Aims of pbuilder</title> <para> + <command>pbuilder</command> stands for + Personal Builder, and it is a automatic Debian Package Building system + for personal environments. <command>pbuilder</command> aims to be an easy-to-setup system for auto-building Debian packages inside a clean-room environment, so that it is possible to verify that a package can be built on most Debian installations. + Clean-room environment is achieved through use of a chroot image, + so that only minimal packages will be installed inside the + chroot. </para> <para> Debian distribution consists of free software @@ -30,11 +36,19 @@ worst choice of all if there was a choice to be made. </para> <para> - In this way, pbuilder tries to ensure that packages - tested against pbuilder will be able to build in + In this way, <command>pbuilder</command> tries to ensure + that packages + tested against pbuilder will build in most Debian environments, hopefully resulting in a good overall Debian source-buildability. </para> + <para> + The goal of making Debian buildable from source is + somewhat achieved, and has progressed well. + It is known that Debian 3.0 is not quite + buildable from source, but the next version should + be better. + </para> </sect1> </chapter> <chapter> @@ -314,6 +328,79 @@ </ulink> </para> </sect1> + <sect1> + <title>Inaccurate Background of pbuilder</title> + <para> + The following is most possibly inaccurate account of how + pbuilder happened to come, and other attempts to + make something like pbuilder to happen. + </para> + <sect2> + <title>The Time Before PBuilder</title> + <para> + There were dbuild, which was a shell script to build + Debian packages from source. Lars Wirzenius wrote that + script, and it was good, short, and simple (probably). + There was nothing like build-depends then (I think), and it was simple. + It could have been improved, I don't have the source off-hand. + </para> + <para> + debbuild was probably written by James Troup. I don't know it + because I have never seen the actual code, I could only find some + references to it on the net, and mailing list logs. + </para> + <para> + sbuild is a perl script to build Debian package from source. + It parses Build-Dependency, and performs other misc checks, + and has a lot of hacks to actually get things building, + including a table of what package to use when virtual packages are + specified (does it do that still?). + It supports use of local database for packages which do not + have build-dependency. It was written by Ronan Hodek, + and I think it was patched and fixed and extended by + several people. It is part of wanna-build, and used extensively + in Debian buildd system. I think it was maintained + mostly by Ryan Murray. + </para> + </sect2> + <sect2> + <title>Birth of PBuilder</title> + <para> + wanna-build (sbuild) was quite difficult to set up, and it was + never a Debian package. dbuild was something that predated + Build-Depends. + </para> + <para> + Building package from source using Build-Depends + information within a chroot sounded trivial; and + pbuilder was born. It was initially a shell script + with only a few lines, which called debootstrap + and chroot and dpkg-buildpackage in the same run, + but soon, it was decided that's too slow. + </para> + <para> + Yes, and it took almost an year to get things somewhat + right, and in the middle of the process, Debian 3.0 + was released. Yay. + Debian 3.0 wasn't completely buildable with pbuilder, + but the amount of packages which are not buildable + are steadily decreasing. (I hope) + </para> + </sect2> + <sect2> + <title>And the second year of its life</title> + <para> + And someone wanted pbuilder to run as not root, + and User-mode-linux has become more useful as time passed, + I've started experimenting with pbuilder-uml. + pbuilder-uml has not been able to run as often as it should, + and bootstrapping user-mode-linux environment has been + pretty hard. + </para> + </sect2> + + + </sect1> </chapter> </book> |