Using Debootstrap and Pbuilder to Build Debian Packages
Building Debian packages within your normal system can be quite dangerous because care has to be taken that the resulting binary won’t link against wrong libraries etc. To simplify this process there are a few useful tools available. These can not only be used to build packages, other use cases include building a chroot environment from a given distribution or install a base system.
Creating a chroot environment
Debootstrap builds a chroot environment of a given distribution. First take a look at what will be installed.
debootstrap --print-debs sid .
If it looks ok, then download the packages. I prefer to keep them in a tarball for further use:
debootstrap --make-tarball sid-chroot.tgz sid .
Later you can use that tarball to actually extract the debs an install them into a given directory.
mkdir ~/sid-chroot && cd ~/sid-chroot
debootstrap --unpack-tarball sid-chroot.tgz sid .
If everything worked so far you should now have a complete root filesystem which is ready to chroot into.
chroot . /bin/sh
Another package which can do nearly the same is cdebootstrap, it is mostly a re-implementation od debootstrap written in C for use in the debian-installer.
cdbootstrap -f minimal sid .
Compiling packages in a clean room environment
If you want to compile Debian packages in a clean room environment then take a look at pbuilder. First you will need to create a build environment, as a side note pbuilder uses debootstrap to accomplish this.
pbuilder create --distribution sid
This will create a base.tgz file in /var/cache/pbuilder.
By default changes to the pbuilder environment will be lost after logout. To prevent this you have to login as follows:
pbuilder login --save-after-login
Now we are able to build actual packages for example do something like
apt-get source gcc-4.1-source
pbuilder build *.dsc
Further information
For further information consult the man pages of the corresponding programs. In addition the following sites could be quite interesting.