This program has been written by the following authors:

Junichi Uekawa <dancer@debian.org> <dancer@netfort.gr.jp> -- main code
Dale Amon <amon@vnl.com> -- for runhooks
Daniel Kobras -- Patches and bugfixes for non-interactive building, and 
  some other bugs.
Dagfinn Ilmari Manns?er <ilmari@ping.uio.no> -- devfs support.


History and background of pbuilder
==================================

Just to note the background of this package.


[The Time Before PBuilder]

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.

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.

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.


[Birth of PBuilder]

wanna-build (sbuild) was quite difficult to set up, and it was 
never a Debian package. dbuild was something that predated
Build-Depends.

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.

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)


[And the second year of its life]

And someone wanted pbuilder to run as not root,
and User-mode-linux was getting more useful as time passed,
I've started experimenting with pbuilder-uml.


$Id$