[Pbuilder-maint] Using pbuilder in a Web frontend

[Junichi Uekawa]

Hi,

> In this application, the Developer (or Maintainer, Co-Maintainer, 
> non-Debian Packager, or Volunteer) provides a remote URI corresponding 
> to a DSC file. PUBuilder (written in Perl and working in both Apache2 
> and Cherokee) gets and checks the packages, and provides the user with a 
> ticket number, based in the epoch of the time of the request. The user 
> can come back later with the ticket number to check the results [4] of 
> the process, which runs: pbuilder over the DSC file, in a Sid chroot; 
> linda and lintian over the DSC file and piuparts over the DEB package.
> 
> You can see some screenshots here [1] and here [2], and if you're 
> spanish-speaking, this [3] will give you more information. You'll wonder 
> why there's no website to test the application. That's exactly the topic 
> for this mail: I've seen several ways of getting pbuilder to run as 
> non-root, and I would like to publicly discuss the best way to do that.

Having a web frontend, you will definitely want to consider security
measures.  However, having the users have valid GPG key, and allowing
only those users whom you trust might be just the kind of security you
wanted.  If that's not the intention, the following ideas come up into
my mind:

1. fakechroot hacks might be possible.  

2. pbuilder-user-mode-linux will be waiting for 'rootstrap' et al to get
fixed. They are currently broken.

3. xen hacks might be interesting (running PUBuilder inside Xen domain)

4. running pbuilder inside qemu might be a very interesting hack;
   although performance will suffer a lot.


regards,
	junichi
-- 
dancer@{debian.org,netfort.gr.jp}   Debian Project