Sstrhsrtj

I am trying to edit an Apache module on Debian (strictly, I'm doing this on Raspbian Jessie-Lite), and am broadly following the Debian build instructions:

$ mkdir -p ~/src/debian; cd ~/src/debian

$ apt-get source apache2-bin

$ cd apache2-2.4.10

$ debuild -b -uc -us

And the build process takes roughly one and a half hours on an olde original Pi. Which is fine. Once!
But I believe the build process is performing a make clean and so after a minor edit of a single mod_*.c file, it wants to rebuild the entire thing, which is kind of slowing down my development!

I have tried adding -dc to the debuild command, but then it didn't build anything. I even tried deleting the target mod_*.so file to "encourage" it into rebuilding it, but still no!

UPDATE 2016-08-21: Adding -nc to the debuild command does not cause modules to be recompiled. Here's the output from that command:

$ debuild -b -uc -us -nc

 dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -D -us -uc -b -nc

dpkg-buildpackage: source package apache2

dpkg-buildpackage: source version 2.4.10-10+deb8u5

dpkg-buildpackage: source distribution jessie-security

dpkg-buildpackage: source changed by Salvatore Bonaccorso <carnil@debian.org>

 dpkg-source --before-build apache2-2.4.10

dpkg-buildpackage: host architecture armhf

 debian/rules build

dh build --parallel --with autotools_dev

 fakeroot debian/rules binary

dh binary --parallel --with autotools_dev

 dpkg-genchanges -b >../apache2_2.4.10-10+deb8u5_armhf.changes

dpkg-genchanges: binary-only upload (no source code included)

 dpkg-source --after-build apache2-2.4.10

dpkg-buildpackage: binary-only upload (no source included)

Now running lintian...

N: 16 tags overridden (1 error, 4 warnings, 11 info)

Finished running lintian.

Add the -nc option to your debuild command line. This may expose problems in the build system or the packaging though, so be prepared. But for small fixes it usually works fine.

However, as the apache2 source package uses debhelper (like many other packages), this alone is not enough, because debhelper also keeps its own journal of completed steps in separate log files for each binary package. These can be removed entirely by dh_clean. But to get debhelper redo no more than the necessary work, truncate only the relevant one by

sed -i '/^dh_auto_build$/Q' debian/apache2-bin.debhelper.log

before running debuild -nc.

Inside the debian directory there's a rules file. It's a essentially a make file. If you remove all the directives about cleaning and then add

override_dh_clean:

And put nothing in it no cleaning will happen (at all). Be careful though this might cause build problems, not likely but might. Another alternative is to not change anything and use the -j option to do a parallel build. Not sure the advantage that'd give on a raspberry pi.

Rules file should look like this:
https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg-apache/apache2.git/tree/debian/rules

I had a similar problem; Scite debian package has in debian/rules:

...

BUILD_DATE="$(date --utc --date="@${SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH:-$(date +%s)}" "+%b %d %Y %T")"

override CPPFLAGS += -DBUILD_DATE=""$(BUILD_DATE)""



%:

        dh $@



override_dh_auto_build:

        dh_auto_build --sourcedirectory=scintilla/gtk -- GTK3=1 $(BUILD_LUA)

        dh_auto_build --sourcedirectory=scite/gtk -- gnomeprefix=/usr GTK3=1 $(BUILD_LUA)

....

Essentially, override_dh_auto_build calls the make, which detects changed source files and rebuilds only changed ones. However, even if debian/rules sets BUILD_DATE, running:

fakeroot debian/rules -j$(nproc) override_dh_auto_build

... will fail at some cpp source files that use BUILD_DATE as a define. The solution is to explicitly specify this variable on the command line call:

fakeroot debian/rules -j$(nproc) CPPFLAGS+=-DBUILD_DATE="" override_dh_auto_build

... and then compilation passes (additional bonus is that a new .deb is not created, so you don't have to wait for that). Essentially, this helps to rerun just the rebuild process for changed files that gives you the .so/.exe, without packaging a .deb.