Helmut Grohne

cross building BoF

Cross building is the act of building a package for a machine running a different CPU architecture, kernel or C library than the one where the build is being performed. The main use cases are initially building packages for a new architecture and building embedded OS images from source. The BoF starts with a brief presentation of what works and what does not just work. It’ll quickly lead into a discussion format.

A few ecosystems still pose fundamental difficulties with automatically cross building Debian packages. If you happen to be working on one of the following ecosystems, please tell in advance and join the BoF.

• Fortran
• GCC plugins
• Go
• Haskell
• LLVM/Clang
• Ocaml
• Ruby

If you would like to cross compile a particular package, please tell in advance and join the BoF.

The precise topics will depend on the audience. We will focus on matters relevant to those who attend.

Reviving (un)schroot?

The schroot tool has been the primary build backend used by sbuild for a long time. More and more work has gone into a new unshare backend that we are slowly transitioning to. It solves several problems with schroot ranging from convenience, via security to reproducibility. However, the unshare backend comes with several downsides. Effectively, it bundles a container runtime into sbuild. The new backend inevitably regresses some use cases such as conveniently interacting with chroot environments outside builds. The question arises: Can we provide the improvements gained from unshare via the schroot API to sbuild? I will present a proof-of-concept, its limitations and request feedback regarding what features are needed to make it practically useful.

Meet the Technical Committee

An opportunity to meet the members of the Debian Technical Committee who are in attendance at DebConf, hear the status of open issues, and discuss pending and future issues.