[buildd-tools-devel] Bug#859867: Please add a package which automatically configures sbuild for Debian packaging

[Michael Stapelberg]

Package: sbuild
Version: 0.73.0-4
Severity: wishlist

I’ve been using sbuild instead of pbuilder for a few years now, and I
generally like it: it seems almost universally better than pbuilder.

One area where sbuild sorely lacks is configuration, though: pbuilder
is very easy to set up, whereas sbuild requires reading through
https://wiki.debian.org/sbuild, performing a bunch of steps, only to
end up with a setup which works fine for unstable, but seems very
clumsy when building packages for experimental or backports.

One solution to this issue that I can see is to add a new binary
package to src:sbuild which — possibly after a brief debconf prompt —
performs all the necessary steps to end up with a setup that just
works.

What are your thoughts on this? Would patches be welcome to add such a
package?

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 9.0
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable-debug'), (500, 'testing-debug'), (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386, armel, mipsel, arm64

Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages sbuild depends on:
ii  adduser         3.115
ii  libsbuild-perl  0.73.0-4
pn  perl:any        <none>

Versions of packages sbuild recommends:
ii  autopkgtest  4.3
ii  debootstrap  1.0.88
ii  schroot      1.6.10-3+b1

Versions of packages sbuild suggests:
ii  deborphan  1.7.28.8-0.3+b1
ii  kmod       23-2
ii  wget       1.18-5

-- no debconf information