Re: [Gnash-dev] Install instructions in the wiki fail for Ubuntu Jaunty

[Richard Wilbur]

On Tue, 2010-02-16 at 22:07 -0700, Rob Savoye wrote:
[...]
>  I haven't figured out how to make the new repository somehow put up
> it's GPG key. I'm new to the whole repository administration thing, but
> it seemed a good idea to make the most recent version of Gnash available
> to people so they don't have to build from source.
> 
How is your repository hosted?  Do you put files into it using FTP?
Launchpad automatically creates a key for a Personal Package Archive
(PPA) repository when you create it.  Then it automatically signs the
binary package after building it from the source package you upload.
There must be some convention that I haven't dug deep enough to discover
yet, as typing
  add-apt-repository ppa:bazaar 
will not only update sources.list but import the proper key for a
Launchpad PPA.  The responsible code would have to be in
python-software-properties[1] or one of its dependencies.

> > It was a nice try to specify "ubuntu" rather than "jaunty", but
> > unfortunately our built packages seem to be specific to Ubuntu Karmic
> > rather than generic to multiple Ubuntu releases.
> 
>   Right, because I only have Karmic build machines for Ubuntu. It would
> be nice to support at least one distro back. I did make sure Gnash
> compiled on Hardy, an LTS release. I sortof missed Jaunty. I'd need to
> build up either VM images, install old versions on old hardware, or get
> access on other build slaves.
> 
>   I gave up on buildbot, so these days I do it partially by hand and
> just login to the build slaves. Most of the work is built into Gnash's
> Makefiles, "make deb" does all the work. If anyone else wants to build
> debs, I can give them upload access to the repository's incoming
> directory. I'll see about adding support for multiple versions of
> multiple distributions in the repository. Help from anyone that's done
> this before would also be nice.

I have used pbuilder under Ubuntu to build binary packages from source
packages for a particular Ubuntu release.  It does a decent job as it
creates a chroot build environment with the build dependencies from the
target Ubuntu release repositories.  The chroot build environment takes
a little hard disk space to keep around (not too much as they are
minimal to start with and also stored compressed) but updates are much
faster than creating a new one.

An example of my use of pbuilder to build PowerPC binaries of a recent
bzr release for Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy):

cd ~/bzr; apt-get source bzr; # The bzr project Personal Package Archive
                              # (PPA) is in my sources.list
sudo pbuilder update --distribution hardy; # Updates the chroot build
         # environment with latest packages from Ubuntu 8.04 (hardy).
sudo pbuilder build --distribution hardy bzr_2.0.3-1~bazaar1~hardy.dsc
# pbuilder deploys the chroot build environment, downloads any
# specified build dependencies that were missing, tries to build the
# package source code, and if successful creates the binary package and
# changelog files in /var/cache/pbuilder/result
cd /var/cache/pbuilder/result;
sudo gpg --armor --sign --detach-sig
bzr_2.0.3-1~bazaar1~hardy_powerpc.deb
# Here I sign the binary package creating
# bzr_2.0.3-1~bazaar1~hardy_powerpc.deb.asc
sudo gpg --armor --sign --detach-sig
bzr_2.0.3-1~bazaar1~hardy_powerpc.changes
# Likewise the changes.
# Then I upload the four files (binary, binary.asc, changes,
# changes.asc) to the desired download directory.

I recently found a good discussion of pbuilder[2], discovered the
configuration file ~/pbuilderrc and was able to specify the release
there instead of repeating it on the command line.

This sounded like with a little setup you could simplify the process to
build for multiple releases and even architectures![3]

Let me know if I raised more questions than I answered;>)

Richard

References:
[1] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/CommandLine#Adding%
20Launchpad%20PPA%20Repositories 
[2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PbuilderHowto 
[3] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PbuilderHowto#Building%20an%20i386%
20pbuilder%20on%20AMD64 

--
Richard Wilbur
mailto:address@hidden 
http://www.linkedin.com/in/richardwilbur 
https://launchpad.net/~richard-wilbur 
OpenPGP public key at
http://keyserver.ubuntu.com:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xA7CEB3C711AFF0B0

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