The new release of dose, apart from a few bug fixes, ships a new and improved version of dose-builddebcheck (man page). All the improvements done to dose-builddebcheck are from a set of patches submitted by Johannes Schauer in the context of the Bootstrap GSoC. We are still actively working on this. I invite you to read josh’s recent blog post on the topic. For more background and discussion, you can have a look at the archives of this mailing list.
Dose-builddebcheck (or buildcheck for short) is similar in intent to dose-debcheck but for source packages. Buildcheck allows you to check, just by looking at the Source and Packages files, if all the dependencies can be satisfied and installed, all this in a matter of seconds (less then 30 secs to test all the source packages in sid on my laptop).
A simple example :
deb-buildcheck.native \
--deb-native-arch=amd64 \
tests/DebianPackages/Sid-amd64-Packages-050812.bz2
tests/DebianPackages/Sid-Sources-050812.bz2
native-architecture: amd64
background-packages: 55945
foreground-packages: 18175
broken-packages: 64
real 0m22.223s
user 0m21.937s
sys 0m0.204s
This will check for all source packages in the Source file if their build dependencies can satisfied on amd64 given the Packages binary file. This is nice but nothing new. A script based on the old edos tools has been around for quite a long time. We want more !
The new exciting feature brought by Johannes is the capability of checking source packages for cross-compilation :
dose-builddebcheck -f -e -s --checkonly picolisp \
--deb-native-arch=amd64 \
--deb-foreign-archs=armel \
--deb-host-arch=armel \
tests/DebianPackages/Sid-amd64-Packages-050812.bz2 \
tests/DebianPackages/Sid-armel-Packages-050812.bz2 \
tests/DebianPackages/Sid-Sources-050812.bz2
(I)Sources: Parsing Sources file tests/DebianPackages/Sid-Sources-single-version-050812.bz2...
(I)Format822: total packages 17723
(I)Format822: Merging repositories
(I)Packages: Parsing Packages file tests/DebianPackages/Sid-armel-Packages-050812.bz2...
(I)Packages: Parsing Packages file tests/DebianPackages/Sid-amd64-Packages-050812.bz2...
(I)Format822: total packages 58095
native-architecture: amd64
foreign-architecture: armel
host-architecture: armel
report:
-
package: src:apicolisp
version: 3.1.0.7-1
architecture: kopensolaris-amd64,solaris-amd64,amd64,any-i386,any-armel,any-armeb,any-arm,any-avr32,any-hppa,any-m32r,any-m68k,any-mips,any-mipsel,any-powerpc,any-s390,any-sh3,any-sh3eb,any-sh4,any-sh4eb,any-sparc,any-armhf
source: picolisp (= 3.1.0.7-1)
status: ok
background-packages: 75818
foreground-packages: 17723
broken-packages: 0
This will check, if the source package ‘picolisp’ in the Sources file can be cross compiled for ‘armel’ on the native architecture ‘amd64’ given the list of binary packages in the Packages file. The generated report is, as for dose-debcheck, encoded in yaml and it can be simply parsed using an off-the-shelf library.
Apt is the canonical tool that can be used to check if a package can be cross compiled. Josh found a few discrepancies between dose and apt results. This was a very good test for both tools: Bug #683786 is a very interesting read…
Dose 3.1.1 (the latest release) should land soon in experimental. Otherwise you can get it from our (new) project homepage.