rebuildd is a build daemon to rebuild Debian packages.
A bit of history
Once upon a time
During the release cycle of the Debian 4.0 (etch) version, I decided to rebuild several times the Debian archive on my idle sparc and i386 boxes. The main goal of this action was to find FTBFS bugs.
Currently, rebuilding the whole packages archive implies to set-up a buildd, which is kind of complicated stuff.
I already wrote up a bit of documentation about this process, but I was not totaly convinced.
buildd was not made for what I wanted to do. The database is ugly, it's old tech and it's Perl. Furthermore, sbuildd, is easily breakable by a postinst problem or whatever, leaving your chroot broken and unusable. schroot support has never really worked, and looking at the code (some months before) about this feature, I think it was a
First idea
My first idea was to rewrite some kind of buildd in a better way, I mean in a way that works.
Rewriting the build process was not one of my goal, and I succeeded in that by choosing pbuilder (or cowbuilder, or whatever you want) to build things.
That gave me a better idea on what to focus on: the build management.
I chose to use Python as programming language, mainly because I never heavily used it.
Overview
Here is the diagram of what 5 days of coding gave, giving the first 0.1.0
release:
The main specifications of rebuildd is multi-threading, and probably, a small design. Beware: I'm not a Python-guru yet, so some kind of stuff may appear to be tricky or inefficient, mainly because I am not comfortable with the language yet. However, I welcome patches. Lucky you. However becoming with 0.2.0, things are better.
All data are stored in a SQL backend. You can use any SQL engine, I really don't care, since all the job is not done by me. By default, rebuildd uses SQLite, which may be a poor choice.
Future
I think there's a lot of things to add, but it's functional for me right now. I'd like to add Web 2.0 feature, like using AJAX to refresh build logs in realtime on the webpage. That would be SO GREAT LOL.
Download
Packages
rebuildd is available in Debian.
Git
The Git repository is available on Alioth.
How it works
Just install the Debian package. You will need at least Python 2.5, Webpy (python-webpy) and SQLObject (python-sqlobject).
I advise you to run rebuildd in a chroot (use debootstrap to create one).
Then run it as root, so you will be able to use pbuilder. (If you don't want to run it as root, you can use sudo, but you will run into trouble when you'll want to cancel and halt build jobs)
A network server will be launched: a telnet server on port 9999.
Juste telnet to the first one, and enjoy. Here's an example session on what you can do. Please remember to type help for getting help.
% telnet localhost 9999 Trying 127.0.0.1... Connected to localhost. Escape character is '^]'. Connected on rebuildd on abydos.adm.naquadah.org rebuildd@abydos-> status rebuildd@abydos-> help config -- Manipulate configuration file help -- Show help job -- Manipulate jobs job add -- Add job job cancel -- Cancel job job reload -- Load new jobs job start -- Start jobs status -- Show current jobs status version -- Show version rebuildd@abydos-> job add telak 0.5-1 sid I: job added rebuildd@abydos-> job reload I: 1 new jobs added rebuildd@abydos-> job start I: 1 jobs started rebuildd@abydos-> status I: Job 100 for telak_0.5-1 is status BUILDING on sid/i386 for None rebuildd@abydos-> job add telak 0.5-1 sid i386 acid@debian.org I: job added rebuildd@abydos-> job reload I: 1 new jobs added rebuildd@abydos-> status I: Job 100 for telak_0.5-1 is status BUILDING on sid/i386 for None I: Job 101 for telak_0.5-1 is status WAIT_LOCKED on sid/i386 for acid@debian.org
Note that rebuildd will do a job reload by itself every check_every seconds.
You can check what's going on by opening the rebuildd log, located by default on /var/log/rebuildd/rebuildd.log.
You can also view builds status and logs in live by pointing your Web browser to port 9998 of your server. This only works if you start rebuildd-httpd. You'll see something like that:
There's also a command line tool which can manipulate database, called rebuildd-job.