Comments on: Backporting Debian packages with pbuilder

By: tyler

tyler — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:07:30 +0000

Kushal,

It doesn’t matter. On either platform, download the jaunty source files, and run:

sudo DIST=hardy pbuilder builder program.dsc

By: Kushal Koolwal

Kushal Koolwal — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:59:37 +0000

Say I want to backport a package from Jaunty to Hardy. So should I be installing the pbuilder and doing all the build process on Jaunty or Hardy. Or it does not matter?

By: SKaRCHa

SKaRCHa — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 23:48:58 +0000

Very, very useful… This helped me to backport some packages from Ubuntu Karmic to Ubuntu Jaunty…

Thank you very much! ;)

By: Jason Boxman

Jason Boxman — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 23:45:29 +0000

I just went through this for the latest Apache packages from Lenny for an Etch box. The pbuilderrc is quite appreciated. I moved my care-n-feeding hooks into the user dir and everything worked. Backporting Apache 2.2 to Sarge was more of a challenge, though. I didn’t know about dget. Also awesome.

Thanks.

By: Adam

Adam — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 13:30:00 +0000

Thank you. That’s really useful. I now have a very nice package for darcs2 on hardy.

By: tyler

tyler — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:00:52 +0000

pbuilder will download and install any packages needed to build your target package. However, you'll still have to download .dsc, .diff, and .tar.gz files for all the packages you want to build, and build them. Some of your new packages may depend on the ones you've previously built, so you'll have to make them available too. See this, You'll also have to use your /var/cache/pbuilder/DIST-ARCH/result directory as a local apt-cache. That link will help. I've run PHP4 packages from Ubuntu dapper in hardy (just never removed them after upgrade), and they work fine. At least, as php4-cgi (not as an apache module). That allowed me to run legacy apps for the year I needed to remove them.

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:31:16 +0000

ahhh I had thought that pbuilder was going to work out dependencies.

It looks as if I have to work out all the dependencies and install or build each one of them manually.

I’ve found that in many cases while the dependencies it complains about are available in Lenny pbuilder doesn’t install them while in other cases it does.

Its been pretty confusing so far, however this is possibly because I’m ‘forward porting’ rather than ‘back porting’. In working my way toward php4 I had to build db4.4 packages as Lenny appears to have 4.2,4.5 and 4.6… but 4.4 conflicts with these… so that wasn’t going to work out. I gave up at this point; as sole sysadmin in a small web development/hosting company, I don’t have time to resolve this complexity.

It would be lovely if there were already existing php4 packages for Lenny :( I know php4 won’t get any security updates but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t maintain the rest of the packages on the servers… and we don’t have the resources to upgrade all of our apps to php5 in anything like a reasonable amount of time (ie before end-of-life for Etch).

By: tyler

tyler — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 06:08:45 +0000

No, it is not insurmountable. However, you’ll probably need to edit the package (.dsc file and create a new .diff) to change the dependencies in the individual packages. Probably apache-dev has been renamed, and other packages. PHP is a complicated set of packages, so you might have some work ahead of you.

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 20:54:57 +0000

I’m interested in ‘forward porting’ of php4 packages from Debian Etch to Debian Lenny.

I tried this out with pbuilder but had failed dependencies lots of things like:

Unpacking pbuilder-satisfydepends-dummy (from …/pbuilder-satisfydepends-dummy.deb) …
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of pbuilder-satisfydepends-dummy:
pbuilder-satisfydepends-dummy depends on apache-dev (>= 1.3.23); however:
Package apache-dev is not installed.

Is this an insurmountable obstacle?