Package: debhelper
Version: 13.6ubuntu1
Severity: wishlist
Dear Maintainer,
I'm working on a use-case which can be generalized as wanting to be able to
perform a build with debhelper in a read-only source directory. Not simply
that the files themselves are read-only, but that the full directory
tree is read-only. Think of building source from a directory on a CD-ROM,
a NFS mount with read-only permissions, or in my case a Docker container with
the source code on a read-only bind mount.
Many of the required capabilities are already supported. For example, the
--builddirectory flag allows the building step to be placed in a different
directory. The autotools like automake and autoconf support building
out-of-tree. However, I'm left with debhelper and related scripts themselves.
The debhelper scripts are causing a few issues. The immediate issue which has
led me to file this ticket is that debhelper really wants to write log files
into the source directory. This results in an error such as:
dh_autoreconf_clean: error: failed to write to debian/<package>.debhelper.log:
Read-only file system
I tried to work around this by hacking up the debhelper scripts in the Docker
image by doing:
RUN sed -i -e
's!"debian/${ext}debhelper.log"!"/working/debian/${ext}debhelper.log"!g'
/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Debhelper/Dh_Lib.pm
RUN sed -i -e 's!debian/\*.debhelper.log!/working/debian/\*.debhelper.log!g'
/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Debhelper/SequencerUtil.pm
RUN sed -i -e 's!debian/\*.debhelper.log!/working/debian/\*.debhelper.log!g'
/usr/bin/dh_clean
This failed because the script was unable to find the log file to delete, with
error message:
dh_autoreconf_clean: error: failed to write to
/working/debian/<package>.debhelper.log: No such file or directory
The changes required are clearly more extensive than a little string
substitution. And if the work involved is going to be extensive, it should
probably be handled by someone with knowledge of (and the wisdom to) alter the
architecture as well.
One other possibly-related item of note (I can file a separate bug if you like)
and which may have an existing solution:
Passing in --buildinfo-option=-u/out still results in a -O option which
refers to the wrong directory. That is, I get the following:
dpkg-genbuildinfo -u/out --build=binary
-O../<package>_2.0.6-1_amd64.buildinfo
dpkg-genbuildinfo: error: cannot write
../<package>_2.0.6-1_amd64.buildinfo.new: Permission denied
This resulted from an experiment where I was copying the source code to a
temporary directory with read/write permissions, but where the parent
directory was not writable.
Thank you for your time,
- Garrett
*** Reporter, please consider answering these questions, where appropriate ***
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* What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
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