On Thu, Feb 12, 2026 at 06:12:59PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
>
> Have you tried just running dgit sbuild? That invokes sbuild directly
> rather than git-buildpackage, so maybe that skips something that you're
> relying on, but that worked fine for me when I started moving away from
> git-buildpackage.
The features I use of git-buildackage is (a) making sure I'm building
from a valid branch for building debian packages, (b) using
pristine-tar to extract the proper tar.gz file, (c) specifying the
correct options to sbuild for a particular debian branch --- e.g., in
my debian/backports branch, the debian/gbp.conf file contains:
[DEFAULT]
pristine-tar = True
upstream-tag='v%(version)s'
debian-branch=debian/backports
[buildpackage]
builder = sbuild -A -s -v -d bookworm-backports
> Anyway, I think you are running into problems because you thought you
> needed to use all the gbp options because you're using git-buildpackage,
> but all those options do complicated things to handle patches-unapplied
> trees. Since you have a patches-applied tree, I don't think you need any
> of that and adding gbp- and --gbp and whatnot may just be breaking things
> for you.
Well, I started by using "gbp buildpackage", and I have things set up
so that all of the magic options needed by sbuild, et. al, are
automatically specified based on what branch I have checked out what I
am doing. My preference is to avoid needing to type complex commands
like:
dgit sbuild -A -s -v -d bookworm-backports
... because I will invariablty forget some option, or typo the name of
the schroot, etc.
For me, "gbp buildpackage ; dupload" is simple, and easy. Needing to
type some complex command, such as
dgit --quilt=nofix gbp-build
means that I will forget, because I'm not typing these commands often
enough for them to be finger macros. In fact, I think I had figured
out the fact that dgit gbp-build requires adding the magic
--quilt=nofix option before. But I had forgotten it some 6-12 months
later when I needed to build e2fsprogs with a non-zero debian/patches
directory. Needing to stare at the dgit man page to figure it out is
just annoying.
I suppose I could create my own shell script that has all of the magic
incantations required by dgit, whether it's --quilt=nofix, or
specifying all of the options which sbuild requires on the command
line. But quite frankly, it's a lot easier to just say, screw it,
I'll just skip using dgit when it doesn't work out of the box. It
means that dgit repo will have some fast forwards in it, but so long
as the source .dsc plus debian tarfile is authoratative, and for my
part, given that I consider the preferred form of modifiction to be
the debian/{master,backports} branch in my e2fsprogs git repo, and not
the dgit repo --- shrug.
If the dgit maintainers want to make it easy so that "dgit gbp-build"
always does the right thing --- or even "dgit sbuild" without needing
any magic options added to the comandline, because I can specify the
option that needed depending on whether I'm building for unstable,
backports, or old-backports, via some per-branch config file, great.
Otherwise, I'm not convinced it's adding any value for me.
Cheers,
- Ted
