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'sbuild can do its work in chroots so both stable and unstable
environments can be used on the same machine. Useful for, say, building
the latest unstable packages against stable library versions. And by
keeping only essential and build-essential in the chroots, you can find
the correct build dependencies for a package. '

* Other testing tools

The tools mentioned below are emulators of systems. These can be used to
create a fake machine, install Debian from scratch, check the
installation and exit out of the machine cleanly (saving or discarding
results as required).

UML (User Mode Linux) http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/
VMWare (x86 emulator that runs under win32 and Linux on x86) [not free].
linx	(couldn't find a web page for this one, runs Linux executables on
win32)
Bochs (x86 emulator which can optionally use Plex86 to improve
performance (good improvement I'm told)).

Note: I"v heard a rumour that UML may now run better on non x86
architectures. Can anyone confirm this ?

* Things to be careful of
If you are writing a program that creates a chroot, it's important for
the call after the chroot to change the working directory into the new
root. If not, the program can get around as root in the main filesystem.
Supposedly BSD has a good way of getting around this issue.

** Tangents and other tidbits...

For more information on some of these topics, feel free to rock on up to
#debian-devel on IRC and ask questions. the Debian mailing lists
debian-user and debian-mentor may also help.

* Auto-apt

If you're feeling adventurous, there is a utility called auto-apt that
automatically downloads a package and it's dependent packages when an
uninstalled command is called from the command line. As an example, with
gnome uninstalled and auto-apt installed, you can type 'gnome' on a
command line and behind the scenes auto-apt will download all of the
necessary files to start gnome (don't expect it to be super fast
though). This is made possible by the contents file stored with the
Debian repository.

* http://www.apt-get.org/

This site is an unofficial repository of for debs that are not available
for given Debian releases. This includes things like the latest X11
Windowing system and the latest Perl version back ported to Woody. Great
if you need new stuff on the previous system.

* http://snapshot.debian.net/

If you like to run your system on sid (unstable), you might like to use
snapshot.debian.org. This site provides you with all of the .debs
related to a given date within unstable. This may be handy if newer
versions of packages introduce bugs that are unnacceptable for your
environment.
The disk usage graph for this site is a little scary.

* Debian 10th birthday celebration

The Debian distribution turns 10 on August 16th this year.
There was some talk about where the celebration will be held. Can
someone copy the list on what the status for that is so far ?
More details will also be available at http://www.debconf.org/10years/
when they become available for Sydney.
Note: The Sydney party will be held on the 13th.


* Lively Discussions

* 'Packages shouldn't depend on automake (or was that libtool ?)'
This topic brought up some good discussion on automake. There was an
opinion voiced that you shouldn't need to get your package to depend on
automake. I didn't fully understand the gist of this conversation, but
my guess is that people didn't want to have a dependency on various
versions of automake and should just use it as part of a base
development system. 

* read only / and /usr
Someone had done some investigations of what would be involved in
getting / and /usr to be read only. Writable files that live in /  could
be moved to /var/whatever. There were only 4 files that would need to be
moved for /. /usr would take some more work, but this should be possible
too. I believe conversations are ongoing.

** Conclusions
If you want to test your package more rigorously than just doing a
linda/lintian check, chrooted environments like pbuilder and sbuild can
be very useful (for some tasks like installation, essential). Other
tools, such as machine emulators can be useful too.

Thanks for the discussion, I learnt a lot. Please forward corrections or
comments.

Cheers
DC