It takes a long time to build even the source package for a PPA of a huge project, and while the build isn't finished my computer is under heavy load so I can barely navigate a browser. The frustration is doubled when I get an error during that process.

Most of the times, errors are caused by a "malformed" patch. To avoid those, I incorporated the habit of copying the patches directory over to the unpacked .orig tarball and executing quilt push -a -v to make sure all patches apply successfully.

However, the Debian tool chest can be a bit arcane at times. That very same patch set occasionally fails when building the package with debuild -S -d -sd. For example,

 dpkg-source -b .
dpkg-source: info: using source format '3.0 (quilt)'
dpkg-source: info: building chromium-browser using existing ./huge-stuff_116.0.521.orig.tar.xz
### AFTER A LONG TIME... ###
dpkg-source: info: using patch list from debian/patches/series
dpkg-source: error: line after --- isn't as expected in diff 'huge-stuff.orig.lbv71S/debian/patches/priority.patch' (line 5)

This long time, I reckon, is caused by dpkg-source extracting the .orig tarball every single time I issue a build, even if it had just done so for the previous failed build.

Is there a way to preserve the extracted sources so that dpkg-source doesn't have to extract it again in the next iteration?

I couldn't find anything in the manual when looking for tarball.

Only keep reading if you are curious; The following is irrelevant to the question.

The actual error in the question was stupid, caused by the patch header being

--- a/foo/bar.h
--- b/foo/bar.h

instead of

--- a/foo/bar.h
+++ b/foo/bar.h

Nonetheless, quilt push -a -v did happily apply it somehow (exit status 0) when I tried it on the unpacked sources:

Applying patch patches/priority.patch
patching file foo/bar.h

Now at patch patches/priority.patch

posted over 1 year ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Quasímodo‭

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