To boldly build what no one has built before

Timestamp: 2025-04-04 12:17
Tags: debian

Last week, we (Helmut, Jochen, Holger, Gioele and josch) met in Würzburg for a Debian crossbuilding & bootstrap sprint. We would like to thank Angestöpselt e. V. for generously providing us with their hacker space which we were able to use exclusively during the four-day-sprint. We’d further like to thank Debian for their sponsorship of accommodation of Helmut and Jochen.

The most important topics that we worked on together were:

publicity and funding for bootstrappable and cross-buildable Debian, driven by Gioele, including the creation of a list of usecases and slogans [everyone]
proof-of-concept for substituting coreutils with alternative implementations such as busybox, toybox or uutils [Helmut, Jochen, josch]
writing a patch for documenting the Multi-Arch field in Debian policy #749826 [Helmut, Holger, Jochen, josch]
turning build profile spec text into a patch for Debian policy #757760 [Helmut, Jochen, josch]

Our TODO items for after the sprint are:

josch needs to fix bootstrap.debian.net
josch exports the package lists computed by bootstrap.debian.net in a machine readable format for Holger
writing a mail to d-devel about making coreutils non-essential

In addition to what was already listed above, people worked on the following tasks specifically:

Holger now wants a crossbootstrap pkg set for reproducible builds.
Holger worked on some reproducible builds issues, uploaded ~10 sequoia related packages and did a devscripts upload.
Jochen worked on creating initrds
Jochen helped Holger with sequoia/rust packaging
Jochen worked on sbuild
Jochen discussed cross bootstrapping with Helmut and josch
Jochen fixed bugs in devscripts (debrebuild/debootstrap, build-rdeps, proxy.py)
Jochen worked on reproduce.d.n
Jochen worked on src:kokkos resulting in #1101487
Gioele gathered information and material for possible funding for bootstrapping-related projects.
Gioele ported src:libreplaygain from cdbs to dh.
Helmut dug into lingering debvm issues some. Jochen tracked down the ARM32 autopkgtest regression to #1079443 which is now worked around.
Helmut collected feedback on linux-libc-dev being a:all.
Helmut collected feedback on dropping libcrypt-dev from build-essential and initiated work with Santiago Vila
Helmut collected feedback on how sbuild would want to interface with a better build containment
josch reviewed and merged the following MRs:
josch worked on making the Debian Linux kernel packaging use hooks installed in /usr/share/kernel/*.d and gathered feedback from the other sprint participants in how to best move this forward, culminating in the opening of #1101733 against src:linux.

Thank you all for attending this sprint, for making it so productive and for the amazing atmosphere and enlightening discussions!