Saturday 25 August 2012

HOWTO: Things to remember about cowbuilder

Here are a few things to remember about cowbuilder:

If you run cowbuilder through sudo, and you want to build a source package whose result should be available to the user who initiated the build, then

  • you should have "BUILDRESULTUID=the_user's_id" in ~/.pbuilderrc, and
  • you might want to invoke cowbuilder with

'sudo cowbuilder --build the_pack_to_build.dsc --buildresult destination_dir_for_build_results'

If you want to login into a chroot environment in which you'd like to see part of your directory alongside the unpacked source tree of your package, then invoke cowbuilder with

sudo cowbuilder --login --bindmounts /path/to/the/dir/you/want

Your base.cow directory can be updated/changed manually with

sudo cowbuilder --login --save-after-login

You can update the base.cow directory with

sudo cowbuilder --update

 That's about it.

Also, noteworthy tip: ccache might not work correctly in the cowbuilder chroot.