Re: [DTrace-devel] [PATCH v4] Add packaging configuration for Debian

On 10 Feb 2026, Kris Van Hees via DTrace-devel outgrape:

> Packaging configuration files for Debian are provided in dists/debian.

Nice! Seems to work, even on Debian stable (I was sure I'd need at least
testing, but no!).

> Sample steps to build DEB packages:
>
>  - make dist
>  - cp dtrace-x.y.z.tar.bz2 $D/dtrace_x.y.z.orig.tar.bz2

This...

>  - cd $D
>  - tar -jxpSf dtrace_x.y.z.orig.tar.bz2

... seems rather duplicative with this. See below for a patch with a
make prep-debuild target that does this for you.

>  - cd dtrace-x.y.z
>  - make prep-debian
>  - debuild

It is a bit annoying that you have to do a prep-debian before doing a
build, because this prevents you doing a normal apt-src or any other
large-scale build command unless you already have a source deb that this
was done to. (The changelog generation is nice though!)

I would be inclined to use git-buildpackage here. See
https://honk.sigxcpu.org/projects/git-buildpackage/manual-html/gbp.import.upstream-git.html

I tried for a minimal approach using the postexport hook, but alas gbp
wants a debian/ directory before it'll even run that :( so for now this
seems to be the best we can do.

Here's a tiny patch to let you avoid the make dist in favour of a simple
'make prep-debuild'. (I didn't fold it into make prep-debian because
some package building tools, like apt-src, don't need the .orig.tar.bz2
at all.)

8<--------------------------------->8
From 472a6c863d06f8e419827842e0e455d8f13f6edd Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Nick Alcock <[email protected]>
Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2026 14:29:05 +0000
Subject: [PATCH] dists: add prep-debuild target

This does the creation of the .orig.tar.bz2 in the parent of
the source tree for you.
---
 dists/Build | 8 +++++++-
 1 file changed, 7 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/dists/Build b/dists/Build
index c75f933270fa3..f1ed1a4627176 100644
--- a/dists/Build
+++ b/dists/Build
@@ -9,8 +9,14 @@ dists_DIR := $(current-dir)
 # Prepare package building on Debian (copy ./dists/debian in ./debian, and
 # generate the debian/changelog file.
 
-prep-debian::
+prep-debian:: dist
 	$(call describe-target,DIST-PREP,Debian)
 	rm -rf debian
 	cp -rp $(dists_DIR)/debian .
 	debian/mkChangelog debian/control dtrace.spec > debian/changelog
+
+# Prepare for debuild, which needs a tarball to already be present.
+# Many wrappers around debuild already do this for you.
+
+prep-debuild::
+	mv dtrace-$(VERSION).tar.bz2 ../dtrace_$(VERSION).orig.tar.bz2
-- 
2.47.3
8<--------------------------------->8

> Signed-off-by: Kris Van Hees <[email protected]>

A couple of questions below.

> +prep-debian::
> +	$(call describe-target,DIST-PREP,Debian)
> +	rm -rf debian
> +	cp -rp $(dists_DIR)/debian .
> +	debian/mkChangelog debian/control dtrace.spec > debian/changelog

(I have a tiny patch for this.)

> diff --git a/dists/debian/control b/dists/debian/control
> new file mode 100644
> index 00000000..56687a82
> --- /dev/null
> +++ b/dists/debian/control
> @@ -0,0 +1,74 @@
> +Source: dtrace
> +Section: utils
> +Priority: optional
> +Maintainer: Kris Van Hees <[email protected]>
> +Build-Depends: debhelper-compat (= 13),
> + bison, flex, gawk, gcc-bpf, binutils-bpf, valgrind, binutils-dev, login.defs,
> + libbpf-dev, libc-dev (>= 2.34), libelf-dev, libfuse3-dev, libpcap-dev,
> + libpfm4-dev, libsystemd-dev, libz-dev
> +Standards-Version: 4.5.1

Why 4.5.1? I guess it's what debhelper writes right now. (The current
version of Debian Policy is 4.7.3. It looks to me like we're compatible
with it.)

> +Homepage: https://github.com/oracle/dtrace-utils/
> +Rules-Requires-Root: no
> +
> +Package: dtrace
> +Architecture: any
> +Depends: ${misc:Depends}, ${shlibs:Depends}
> +Description: Dynamic tracing for Linux (DTrace)
> + This is the official Linux port of the advanced tracing tool DTrace.
> + .
> + DTrace is a high-level dynamic tracing tool for Linux, built on kernel
> + tracing features (tracepoints, function probes (fentry/fexit), dynamic
> + kernel probes (kprobes), dynamic userspace probes (uprobes), ... and
> + leveraging BPF as execution engine.  It features an integrated compiler
> + for its high-level tracing language and native support for interacting
> + with the BPF engine, significantly reducing runtime dependencies

Full stop at end of sentence (and for all the others below.)

> +Package: libdtrace2
> +Architecture: any
> +Depends: ${misc:Depends}, ${shlibs:Depends},
> + fuse3, libctf0, libelf1t64, libfuse3-4, libpcap0.8t64, libpfm4, libz1
> +Description: Dynamic tracing for Linux (DTrace) (library)
> + This is the official Linux port of the advanced tracing tool DTrace.
> + .
> + DTrace is a high-level dynamic tracing tool for Linux, built on kernel
> + tracing features (tracepoints, function probes (fentry/fexit), dynamic
> + kernel probes (kprobes), dynamic userspace probes (uprobes), ... and
> + leveraging BPF as execution engine.  It features an integrated compiler
> + for its high-level tracing language and native support for interacting
> + with the BPF engine, significantly reducing runtime dependencies
> + .
> + This package contains the shared library.
> +
> +Package: libdtrace2-dev
> +Architecture: any
> +Depends: ${misc:Depends},
> + libdtrace2 (= ${binary:Version})
> +Description: Dynamic tracing for Linux (DTrace) (development)
> + This is the official Linux port of the advanced tracing tool DTrace.
> + .
> + DTrace is a high-level dynamic tracing tool for Linux, built on kernel
> + tracing features (tracepoints, function probes (fentry/fexit), dynamic
> + kernel probes (kprobes), dynamic userspace probes (uprobes), ... and
> + leveraging BPF as execution engine.  It features an integrated compiler
> + for its high-level tracing language and native support for interacting
> + with the BPF engine, significantly reducing runtime dependencies
> + .
> + This package contains the development files necessary to develop
> + alternative implementations of the user interface for libdtrace, i.e.
> + replacements for dtrace(1) itself.
> +
> +Package: dtrace-tests
> +Architecture: any
> +Depends: ${misc:Depends}, ${shlibs:Depends}, ${perl:Depends},
> + binutils, cpp, gawk, gcc, make, pkgconf, tshark, bpftool
> +Description: Dynamic tracing for Linux (DTrace) (testsuite)
> + This is the official Linux port of the advanced tracing tool DTrace.
> + .
> + DTrace is a high-level dynamic tracing tool for Linux, built on kernel
> + tracing features (tracepoints, function probes (fentry/fexit), dynamic
> + kernel probes (kprobes), dynamic userspace probes (uprobes), ... and
> + leveraging BPF as execution engine.  It features an integrated compiler
> + for its high-level tracing language and native support for interacting
> + with the BPF engine, significantly reducing runtime dependencies
> + .
> + This package contains the testsuite.

(... up to here.)

> diff --git a/dists/debian/copyright b/dists/debian/copyright
> new file mode 100644
> index 00000000..1a5c8f64
> --- /dev/null
> +++ b/dists/debian/copyright
> @@ -0,0 +1,103 @@
> +Format: https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/
> +Upstream-Name: dtrace
> +Upstream-Contact: Kris Van Hees <[email protected]>
> +Source: https://github.com/oracle/dtrace-utils/
> +
> +Files: *
> +Copyright: Copyright (c) 2003, 2026, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
> +License: UPL-1.0
> +
> +Files: include/linux/bpf.h
> +Copyright: Copyright (c) 2011-2014 PLUMgrid, http://plumgrid.com
> +License: GPL-2 with Linux-syscall-note exception
> +
> +Files: include/linux/btf.h
> +Copyright: Copyright (c) 2018 Facebook
> +License: GPL-2 with Linux-syscall-note exception
> +
> +Files: include/sys/auxv.h include/sys/bitmap.h
> +Copyright: copyright (c) 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 at&t

AT&T, surely?

> --- /dev/null
> +++ b/dists/debian/libdtrace2-dev.install
> @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@
> +usr/lib/${DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH}/libdtrace.so
> +usr/include/dtrace
> +usr/include/dtrace.h
> +usr/include/sys/dtrace.h
> +usr/include/sys/dtrace_types.h
> diff --git a/dists/debian/libdtrace2.install b/dists/debian/libdtrace2.install
> new file mode 100644
> index 00000000..36294de3
> --- /dev/null
> +++ b/dists/debian/libdtrace2.install
> @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
> +usr/lib/${DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH}/dtrace/[0-9]*/
> +usr/lib/${DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH}/dtrace/bpf_dlib.o
> +usr/lib/${DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH}/dtrace/drti/
> +usr/lib/${DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH}/dtrace/include/
> +usr/lib/${DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH}/libdtrace.so.*
> +usr/lib/${DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH}/pkgconfig/dtrace.pc
> +usr/lib/${DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH}/pkgconfig/dtrace_sdt.pc
> +usr/lib/systemd/system/dtprobed.service
> +usr/lib/systemd/system/dtrace-usdt.target
> +usr/lib/systemd/system-preset/50-dtprobed.preset
> +usr/lib/udev/rules.d/60-dtprobed.rules
> +usr/sbin/dtprobed

I've always been worried that these lists would be hard to maintain.
It's a shame we can't autogenerate them, though it's hard to imagine
from what. Maybe in the future we should do like we did for the version
numbers, and have a centralized list of files from which we can generate
things like this *and* the install commands in the Build files.

> +++ b/dists/debian/mkChangelog
> @@ -0,0 +1,174 @@
> +#!/usr/bin/awk -f
> +
> +#
> +# This script can be used to convert the dtrace.spec into a Debian changelog
> +# file.  It is intended to be invoked from the 'prep-debian' make target, but
> +# it can be used manually as well:
> +#	mkChangelog debian/control dtrace.spec > debian/changelog

This is really nifty!

> diff --git a/dists/debian/patches/debian-configure.patch b/dists/debian/patches/debian-configure.patch
> new file mode 100644
> index 00000000..d4a89bb9
> --- /dev/null
> +++ b/dists/debian/patches/debian-configure.patch
> @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@
> +Description: issue a warning for unknown configure options
> + The Debian build system specifies configure options that are not known to
> + the DTrace configure script.  They should not cause the configure script
> + to abort.
> +--- dtrace-2.0.4.orig/configure
> ++++ dtrace-2.0.4/configure
> +@@ -172,8 +172,7 @@ for option in "$@"; do
> +         HAVE_VALGRIND=*) write_config_var VALGRIND "$option";;
> +         HAVE_BPFV3=*) write_config_var BPFV3 "$option";;
> +         HAVE_BPFMASM=*) write_config_var BPFMASM "$option";;
> +-        *) echo "Unknown option $option" >&2
> +-           exit 1;;
> ++        *) echo "Unknown option $option" >&2;;
> +     esac
> + done

I assumed you could just stuff an || true in there, but this is being
invoked by dh_auto_configure, so that option isn't available (plus, of
course, if there's an actual error other than unknown args, we don't
want to fail).

Maybe we should just not exit with exitcode 1 on unknown configure
options, only IIRC Gentoo actually wants us to. This may be the best we
can do.

> diff --git a/dists/debian/patches/debian-interpreter-paths.patch b/dists/debian/patches/debian-interpreter-paths.patch
> new file mode 100644
> index 00000000..58bea538
> --- /dev/null
> +++ b/dists/debian/patches/debian-interpreter-paths.patch
> @@ -0,0 +1,107 @@
> +Description: fix interpreter paths in tests
> + Lintian prefers /bin/bash and /bin/sed over /usr/bin/bash and /usr/bin/sed.

Honestly this one I think we should do upstream. I always thought that
/bin/bash is universal and /usr/bin/bash less so.

> --- /dev/null
> +++ b/dists/debian/rules
> @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@
> +#!/usr/bin/make -f
> +# You must remove unused comment lines for the released package.
> +export DH_VERBOSE = 1
> +export DEB_BUILD_MAINT_OPTIONS = hardening=+all
> +export DEB_CFLAGS_MAINT_APPEND  = -Wall -pedantic

I suppose without -Werror this is safe :)

-- 
NULL && (void)