debian-builder 1.5 review

debian-builder is a simple Perl script which is designed to rebuild a Debian package from it's source

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 12K Developer: Steve Kemp

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debian-builder is a simple Perl script which is designed to rebuild a Debian package from it's source. Some distributions such as Gentoo are focussed upon building packages from source code to give speed benefits, but that is not the aim of this program.

I've been experimenting with a version of GCC which is patched to include stack smashing (buffer overflow) protection. One common approach to this problem is to use a modified compiler which will perform some kind of safety checking in potentially vulnerable source code - this usually involves applying a patch to the GCC compiler.

Usage:

Usage is fairly straight-forward and obvious simply run "debian-builder foo" to rebuild package foo.

If all goes well you will see some progress reports (more with --verbose) and a .deb file should eventually appear in /var/cache/debian-builder/deb.

The script will take care of installing all the packages which are required to build the named package, and then removing anything it installed afterwards.

Installation:

Simply download the tarball and run 'make install', alternatively you may download it from my apt-get'able repository.

What's New in This Release:
The handling of build dependencies is now much improved, allowing a greater number of Debian packages, including complex ones such as GNU Emacs and Mozilla Firefox.