On 04/27/2016 05:52 PM, Jonathan Wilkes via Pd-list wrote:
Also, I want to build normal, boring deb packages, not containers or anything like that.
TL;DR cannot help you much....
probably not exactly what you are looking for, but: i (and many other people at Debian) use gbp-buildpackage for building Debian packages (a frontend for pbuilder/schroot/...), which builds packages in a clean environment (that gets bootstrapped from scratch for each build).
apart from not interfering with the environment, this is also a good test whether the assumed build environment is sane (since (official) Debian packages are automatically build on a number of different architectures, this is a reasonable request).
this is accomplished with quite some overhead (basically an entire (minimal) system is re-installed for each build), and the way this is done is slower than on CI-services like travis-ci. otoh, the builds are done against a current Debian/unstable system (which changes daily) rather than some aged ubuntu/precise image (which hasn't changed in the last 4 years).
oh, and it just occured to me, that this requires sudo for each run :-(
so if you don't want to touch your precious baremetal environment, i'd suggest to fire up a virtual machine for development (VirtualBox, libvirt/KVM,...). personally, i'm using this for development of both kernel modules (where a bug usually requires a reboot, which is rather tiresome if it is the machine you are actually doing the work on) and for development on exotic OSs (BSD, Hurd, W32, OSY).
as for normal development targetted at Debian, i haven't experienced any problems so far with installing all that stuff on my day-to-day working environment (hey, i'm a dev; having those things available is part of my work): true, the development machine needs to install a lot of dev-packages which are unneeded on the deployment system, but those dev-packages mainly consist of headers...
gmfadsr IOhannes