AuxiliaryBuildFiles

AuxiliaryBuildFiles

Status

Introduction

When building a package on a buildd, a number of files are created from the source package build that are not suitable to go into the archive, but must be published on a separate location for further use. An existing example is the stripping of translation data as performed by pkgstriptranslations. In the future we also want to strip off debug symbols and possibly other things.

A gereric facility to handle these files is proposed.

Rationale

Right now, the handling of translation tarballs is hardcoded into sbuild, which is a bit ugly and not extensible. The exported tarballs are copied around with some custom scripts and eventually land in http://people.ubuntu.com/~lamont/translations, which is not highly official as well.

Scope and Use Cases

  • Extract translation data from package builds, as done by pkgstriptranslations.
  • Generate standalone debugging symbol files and export them to a public server, where they can be downloaded by e. g. the planned crash reporting agent.
  • Other archive-scale transformations (extract documentation, etc.).

Implementation Plan

Our existing .changes files support auxiliary files if we use special sections/priorities for the auxiliary files. pkgstriptranslations registers the translation tarball with

  • dpkg-distaddfile sourcepackage_version_translations.tar.gz raw-lang extra

(the priority is irrelevant and arbitrary). katie/Launchpad will then export the tarball to an internal server.

Similarly, a future pkgstripdebug builds a deb which contains all the debug symbols of the particular package and registers it with

  • dpkg-distaddfile package_version_debug.deb raw-debug extra

katie/Launchpad exports these debs to debug.ubuntu.com. By using debs as containers, we can use the existing archive and mirror infrastructure for debug.ubuntu.com as well. However, the debs are not intended to be installed, the crash report agent just downloads and unpacks them and feeds the relevant files into gdb.

Packages Affected

  • pkgstriptranslations: Use dpkg-distaddfile to register the tarball.

  • katie: Export auxiliary files mentioned to a separate server.

  • apt: Eventually we will need apt-get download to have better way of downloading debug debs than just urllib.urlretrieve.

User Interface Requirements

None.

Outstanding Issues

CategoryUdu CategorySpec

UbuntuDownUnder/BOFs/AuxiliaryBuildFiles (last edited 2008-08-06 16:33:01 by localhost)