[buildd-tools-devel] Bug#774415: From srebuild sbuild-wrapper to debrebuild

[Niko Tyni]

On Tue, Aug 02, 2016 at 10:49:00PM +0200, Johannes Schauer wrote:

> But then on IRC, HW42 suggested to approach this problem differently. Instead
> of integrating the functionality of figuring out the right repositories to
> reproduce the contents of a buildinfo file into sbuild, write a tool that can
> drive any package builder (like pbuilder).

Thanks for your work. I had a belated look and I'm willing to (help to)
maintain this stuff in the reproducible-builds team.

In general, I like the concept of sbuild/pbuilder accepting .buildinfo
files as input. This makes the user interface simple. My expectation
for this mode of operation would be for the builder to recreate the old
build as closely as possible.

Like you two, I'm also wondering about the interaction of the various
tools here.  The heavy weight lifted by this one is locating the package
versions specified in a .buildinfo file. It seems to me that this
functionality could also be a standalone helper tool that sbuild and
pbuilder could call to determine the necessary apt sources.list entries.

The other somewhat generic thing that the current script does / could
do is mangling the package build dependencies to correspond to the
exact versions in the .buildinfo file. This is a much easier and quite
mechanical task, but it might still be worth to make it into a filter
that takes one .dsc and outputs a modified one with strictly versioned
build dependencies?

With those, I'm thinking that 'sbuild foo.buildinfo' would fork out to
buildinfo-findrepos (or whatever) and possibly buildinfo-mangledsc,
and then read the environment variables, possible binNMU information
etc. from the .buildinfo file by itself.

I suppose there could still be a 'debrebuild' or 'buildinfo-rebuild'
tool that just calls a builder with a .buildinfo file and compares the
resulting binaries.

Thoughts?

I've pushed the current implementation (with a timestamp sorting fix) to

 https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/reproducible/debrebuild.git/

but of course we can still generalize on that and change names etc.
as necessary.
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org