Ubuntu – How to run parallel make with debuild

compilingdebdebuildmakepackaging

I am trying to make a package of a piece of software that I've (co-) written. I'm using

debuild -i -us -uc -b

And in principle that works fine. In order to shorten compilation time I'd like to debuild to run make in parallel (like I normally do by running make -j4, for example).
I've found a few locations on the web that suggest the following:

debuild -eDEB_BUILD_OPTIONS="parallel=4" -us -uc -b
debuild -j4 -us -uc -b

Another site suggested to add some code to the debian/rules file that basically sets

MAKEFLAGS += -j4

However, none of these seems to work. Have I missed something? or should I change something in the autoconf/automake settings of the source?

Best Answer

It has to be enabled in debian/rules. If the package uses dh, there is a line like this in debian/rules:

dh $@

Change that to

dh $@ --parallel

Then your commands will work, at least DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS="parallel=4"

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – debuild: no upstream tarball found

The problem is the -DwC1 in your version string. Per Debian policy the upstream version can contain . + - : ~ but the debian revision can only contain + . ~, so everything before -DwC1 is considered part of the upstream version, and so it is looking for an original tarball with that version.

dch gives a clue about this when you added that entry:

dch warning: your current directory has been renamed to:
../exiv2-0.23-1ubuntu2
dch warning: no orig tarball found for the new version.

Usually when I do a ppa upload of a package I will bump the ubuntu version and add something like ~ppa0 and usually the target release, say ~trusty. So for instance 1ubuntu2 to 1ubuntu3~ppa0~trusty. The extra strings with ~ will cause the version to compare less than 1ubuntu3 so if the package is updated in the main repositories the user will get the newer version.

Really though all you need to do is drop the hyphen from your version, so 1ubuntu2DwC1 would work, or maybe 1ubuntu2.DwC1.

Ubuntu – How to build i386 and amd64 packages on the amd64 laptop using debuild

The packaging (ie debuild) is not the hard part here: building the application is.

There are many ways to build i386 binaries on a 64bits system

Using a 32bits virtual machine

Installing one via virtualbox is straightforward.

This is by far the easiest but it will take a significant amount of disk space and you will need to setup the entire system from scratch.

Setting up a chroot

The idea is to create a minimal i386 sandbox in your 64bits setup.

You will install all the build toolchain and i386 dependencies of your application in the chroot and perform the build from there.

This approach is lighter than the vm one and offers a good deal of isolation.

Kaizou tutorial explains clearly how to do it

A chroot ready to build a gtk vala application will eats about 700M on your harddrive.

Using cross compilation

cmake is able to build your application easily provided you have the multilib toolchain installed.

The multilib toolchain can be installed via

sudo apt-get install g++-multilib

Then you have to specify the m32 parameters to cmake so it can build i386 binaries which is easy.

Of course, you will need to install on your computer all the i386 variants of your application dependencies.

Provided the apt gods are with you, this can be done with:

dpkg --add-architecture i386 
apt-get update
apt-get install libgtk-3-dev:i386 libgee-0.8-dev:i386 ...

Once this is done you can package your shiny i386 binaries with

debuild -ai386 -i -us -uc -b
debuild clean