Pbuilder Intrepid environments should work now

For a few days I've been fighting with what appeared on the outside to be libc6 halting my ability to make a pbuilder build environment. The bug post is over at Debian (#479202). Turns out that something was wrong in perl and a patch has since been released. As of 12:08 yesterday (Ubuntu archive time) the beautiful 5.10.0-9.1 version has been released and synced into Ubuntu Intrepid repos. Mmmmmm, I can finally make Intrepid environments!

I wasn't initially able to create Intrepid environments once libc6 was working, I had to update to them from gutsy's. The fix to this is to use the hardy backported debootstrap package. There is a few ways you can do this yourself.

Method 1 (Easier): Download the package from your favorite archive and use dpkg to install it:

$ wget http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/d/debootstrap/debootstrap_...
$ sudo dpkg -i debootstrap_1.0.9~hardy1.deb

Method 2 (More involved): Enable the backports mirrors in your /etc/apt/sources.list file (optionally set up pinning). This method enables the entire backports repository and may not be preferred behavior.

Start by adding an entry to the backports repository at your favorite mirror and then update your package database

$ sudo su -c "echo 'deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy-backports main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list"
$ sudo apt-get update

You should now see 1.0.9~hardy1 as a candidate when you run apt-cache policy debootstrap. As per usual sudo apt-get install debootstrap will bring it up to the latest and greatest version possible. And that's what we want -- it will install a pbuilder script into /usr/share/debootstrap/scripts which can then let you specify intrepid create targets from the command line.

$ sudo pbuilder --create --distribution intrepid

See the official Ubuntu Help Site for a more detailed description of backports and enabling pinning such that packages are installed from the main/universe/etc repository over the backports unless specified, or check out the official Ubuntu Wiki on pbuilder for a howto on building packages in a clean test environment.