dc9 - 0.5
DebConf9
| Speakers | |
|---|---|
|
Wookey |
| Schedule | |
|---|---|
| Day | DebConf day 6 (2009-07-29) |
| Room | Lower talkroom |
| Start time | 11:00 |
| Duration | 01:00 |
| Info | |
| ID | 390 |
| Event type | bof |
| Track | DebConf |
| Language | en |
| Feedback | |
|---|---|
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Crossbuilding on Debian for a derived distro
How does everyone make their Debian-based products?
Toby Churchill Ltd is just one company basing their products on Debian and using cross-building to do it. The process has provided some challenges, including a transition from Familiar to Debian/Emdebian. I hope that others using the cross-tools and repository and build management tools would like to share experiences of how they build things, manage chroots and manage packages, to find out the better ways others are doing things, and what functionality really is missing. Managing cross-dependencies in a derived distribution set of build chroots is particularly difficult - discussion of how to fix this would be really useful.
TCL have based their product on Familiar for several years. They are in the process of moving to Debian, probably in the form of Emdebian Grip. They use dpkg-cross, apt-cross, schroot, and some home-grown scripts for the build process, keeping parallel native and cross-build environements functional. They use reprepro for package management of releases. They do not yet have something wanna-build-like to keep arches in sync, and really should do.
All this stuff is really cool but there are still issues. pbuilder manages native build dependencies really well, but there is no equivalent to manage cross-build dependencies. Well there are (emdebian-tools, apt-cross), but there are real issues as soon as those deps come from a local repository as well as from Debian. I'd like to discuss this and issues that others have found in order to determine how we should best support people trying to do this sort of thing.
Debian and Emdebian should be a marvellous base for cross-building specific apps on top of, and building systems out of, but there is a little more work needed to make this process reliable and manageable. I think a session to discuss the tools and mechanisms, comparing different people's approaches and issues would be really useful.