debug-on-porterbox

pdo debian eng sw

This work has been brought to you by the wonderful DebCamp.

I needed to reproduce a build issue on an i386 architecture, so I started going through the instructions for finding a porterbox and setting up a chroot.

And then I though, this is long and boring. A program could do that.

So I created a program to do that:

$ debug-on-porterbox  --help
usage: debug-on-porterbox [-h] [--verbose] [--debug] [--cleanup] [--git]
                          [--reuse] [--dist DIST] [--host HOST]
                          arch [package]

set up a build environment to debug a package on a porterbox

positional arguments:
  arch           architecture name
  package        package name

optional arguments:
  -h, --help     show this help message and exit
  --verbose, -v  verbose output
  --debug        debug output
  --cleanup      cleanup a previous build, removing porterbox data and git
                 remotes
  --git          setup a git clone of the current branch
  --reuse        reuse an existing session
  --dist DIST    distribution (default: sid)
  --host HOST    hostname to use (autodetected by default)

On a source directory, you can run debug-on-porterbox i386 and it will:

find out the program name from debian/control (but if you provide it explicitly, you do not need to be in the source directory)
look up db.debian.org's LDAP to find a porterbox for that architecture
log into the machine via ssh
create a work directory
create the chroot, update it, install build dependencies
get the source with apt-get build-dep
alternatively, if using --git and running inside a git repo, create a git repo on the porterbox, push the local git branch to it, and add a remote to push/pull to/from it

The only thing left for you to do is to log into the machine debug-on-porterbox tells you, run the command porterbox tells you to enter the chroot, and debug away.

At the end you can clean everything up, including the remote chroot and the git remote in the local repo, with: debug-on-porterbox [--git] --cleanup i386

The code is on Salsa: have fun!