The Bcfg2 version available in debian etch is quite old (v0.8.6), while the one in lenny is newer v0.9.5.7, it still isn’t the latest stable version 0.9.6 that was released in November last year. Since this version fixes many bugs it is the version that is recommended to use in production at this time (unfortunately it breaks the reporting system, that will not be fixed until the release 1.0 planed for the next months). This post will show how we can rebuild a debian package for the latest stable bcfg2 release so we can easily deploy it on several machines.

Bcfg2 is a debian friendly project, meaning they provide inside the source package all what is needed to build a debian package very easy. We will use for this a debian etch system, but this should work on any debian based system. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a quick post to show how you can rebuild a debian package and skip some steps, like “make test” for example in the upstream package, by passing some build options. More and more debian packages are now supporting the nodocs, nocheck/notest build options. You might want this if you are repeatedly building the package and want to skip some parts and make it faster, or maybe some step is failing while running the tests and that is something acceptable and known. In this case you can build the package as usual and export DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=nocheck.

For example rebuilding the mysql package takes quite a long time, and to skip the package run tests we will do something like:
dpkg-source -x mysql-dfsg-5.0_5.0.67-1.dsc
cd mysql-dfsg-5.0-5.0.67/
DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=nocheck debuild -us -uc

Note: not all packages implement this option and you might want to look in the rules file and see if this is defined or not.