5.10.3. Porting infrastructure and automation

There is infrastructure and several tools to help automate package porting. This section contains a brief overview of this automation and porting to these tools; see the package documentation or references for full information.

5.10.3.1. Mailing lists and web pages

Web pages containing the status of each port can be found at https://www.debian.org/ports/.

Each port of Debian has a mailing list. The list of porting mailing lists can be found at https://lists.debian.org/ports.html. These lists are used to coordinate porters, and to connect the users of a given port with the porters.

5.10.3.2. Porter tools

Descriptions of several porting tools can be found in Porting tools.

5.10.3.3. wanna-build

The wanna-build system is used as a distributed, client-server build distribution system. It is usually used in conjunction with build daemons running the buildd program. Build daemons are slave hosts, which contact the central wanna-build system to receive a list of packages that need to be built.

wanna-build is not yet available as a package; however, all Debian porting efforts are using it for automated package building. The tool used to do the actual package builds, sbuild, is available as a package; see its description in sbuild. Please note that the packaged version is not the same as the one used on build daemons, but it is close enough to reproduce problems.

Most of the data produced by wanna-build that is generally useful to porters is available on the web at https://buildd.debian.org/. This data includes nightly updated statistics, queueing information and logs for build attempts.

We are quite proud of this system, since it has so many possible uses. Independent development groups can use the system for different sub-flavors of Debian, which may or may not really be of general interest (for instance, a flavor of Debian built with gcc bounds checking). It will also enable Debian to recompile entire distributions quickly.

The wanna-build team, in charge of the buildds, can be reached at debian-wb-team@lists.debian.org. To determine who (wanna-build team, release team) and how (mail, BTS) to contact, refer to https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2009/03/msg00096.html.

When requesting binNMUs or give-backs (retries after a failed build), please use the format described at https://release.debian.org/wanna-build.txt.