From e6a1462539e3f8feecbd6e88728cbae06f920c59 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Boyuan Yang Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2024 22:29:36 -0400 Subject: devel/buildd/: Major rewrite of "Why is the autobuilder network needed?" The changes emphasizes that Debian is encouraging the source-only upload, and thus most of the binary packages served to the end user are generated on the autobuilder network. Besides, the logic of this subsection is slightly tweaked to better elaborate the ideas. --- english/devel/buildd/index.wml | 22 ++++++++++++++++------ 1 file changed, 16 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-) diff --git a/english/devel/buildd/index.wml b/english/devel/buildd/index.wml index 3600d7bfdc7..fe9fef6319f 100644 --- a/english/devel/buildd/index.wml +++ b/english/devel/buildd/index.wml @@ -9,15 +9,25 @@ archive and rebuild them for the target architecture.

Why is the autobuilder network needed?

-

The Debian distribution supports quite a -few architectures, but the package maintainers usually only -compile binary versions for a single architecture they have access to -(usually i386 or amd64). The other builds are produced automatically, -ensuring that every package is only built once. Failures are tracked +

+The autobuilder network provides a secure package building +functionality for all supported architectures. +The Debian distribution supports quite a +few architectures, and the package maintainers often do not have +access to all machines with needed architectures. On the other hand, +Debian now requires ordinary binary packages to be generated from the +source code in a controlled build environment (via the source-only upload +requirement) to avoid the introduction of maliciously-crafted +binary packages by human developers. The autobuilder network takes +the package source code and build binary packages automatically, +once for each supported hardware architecture. Failures are tracked in the autobuilder database.

-As Debian/m68k (the first non-Intel port) started, developers for +The autobuilder network also eases the work of Debian Ports maintainers. +When Debian/m68k (the first non-Intel port) started, developers for it had to watch out for new versions of packages and recompile them if they wanted to stay up-to-date with the Intel distribution. All this was done manually: developers watched the upload mailing list for -- cgit v1.2.3