NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | COMMANDS | SUPPORTED FLAGS | FEATURE AREAS | ENVIRONMENT | FILES | EXAMPLES | COLOPHON

dpkg-buildflags(1)               dpkg suite               dpkg-buildflags(1)

NAME         top

       dpkg-buildflags - returns build flags to use during package build

SYNOPSIS         top

       dpkg-buildflags [option...] [command]

DESCRIPTION         top

       dpkg-buildflags is a tool to retrieve compilation flags to use during
       build of Debian packages.  The default flags are defined by the
       vendor but they can be extended/overridden in several ways:
       1.     system-wide with /usr/local/etc/dpkg/buildflags.conf;
       2.     for the current user with
              $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/dpkg/buildflags.conf where $XDG_CONFIG_HOME
              defaults to $HOME/.config;
       3.     temporarily by the user with environment variables (see
              section ENVIRONMENT);
       4.     dynamically by the package maintainer with environment
              variables set via debian/rules (see section ENVIRONMENT).
       The configuration files can contain four types of directives:
       SET flag value
              Override the flag named flag to have the value value.
       STRIP flag value
              Strip from the flag named flag all the build flags listed in
              value.
       APPEND flag value
              Extend the flag named flag by appending the options given in
              value.  A space is prepended to the appended value if the
              flag's current value is non-empty.
       PREPEND flag value
              Extend the flag named flag by prepending the options given in
              value.  A space is appended to the prepended value if the
              flag's current value is non-empty.
       The configuration files can contain comments on lines starting with a
       hash (#). Empty lines are also ignored.

COMMANDS         top

       --dump Print to standard output all compilation flags and their
              values. It prints one flag per line separated from its value
              by an equal sign (“flag=value”). This is the default action.
       --list Print the list of flags supported by the current vendor (one
              per line). See the SUPPORTED FLAGS section for more
              information about them.
       --status
              Display any information that can be useful to explain the
              behaviour of dpkg-buildflags (since dpkg 1.16.5): relevant
              environment variables, current vendor, state of all feature
              flags.  Also print the resulting compiler flags with their
              origin.
              This is intended to be run from debian/rules, so that the
              build log keeps a clear trace of the build flags used. This
              can be useful to diagnose problems related to them.
       --export=format
              Print to standard output commands that can be used to export
              all the compilation flags for some particular tool. If the
              format value is not given, sh is assumed. Only compilation
              flags starting with an upper case character are included,
              others are assumed to not be suitable for the environment.
              Supported formats:
              sh     Shell commands to set and export all the compilation
                     flags in the environment. The flag values are quoted so
                     the output is ready for evaluation by a shell.
              cmdline
                     Arguments to pass to a build program's command line to
                     use all the compilation flags (since dpkg 1.17.0). The
                     flag values are quoted in shell syntax.
              configure
                     This is a legacy alias for cmdline.
              make   Make directives to set and export all the compilation
                     flags in the environment. Output can be written to a
                     makefile fragment and evaluated using an include
                     directive.
       --get flag
              Print the value of the flag on standard output. Exits with 0
              if the flag is known otherwise exits with 1.
       --origin flag
              Print the origin of the value that is returned by --get. Exits
              with 0 if the flag is known otherwise exits with 1. The origin
              can be one of the following values:
              vendor the original flag set by the vendor is returned;
              system the flag is set/modified by a system-wide
                     configuration;
              user   the flag is set/modified by a user-specific
                     configuration;
              env    the flag is set/modified by an environment-specific
                     configuration.
       --query-features area
              Print the features enabled for a given area (since dpkg
              1.16.2).  The only currently recognized areas on Debian and
              derivatives are qa, reproducible, sanitize and hardening, see
              the FEATURE AREAS section for more details.  Exits with 0 if
              the area is known otherwise exits with 1.
              The output is in RFC822 format, with one section per feature.
              For example:
                Feature: pie
                Enabled: yes
                Feature: stackprotector
                Enabled: yes
       --help Show the usage message and exit.
       --version
              Show the version and exit.

SUPPORTED FLAGS         top

       CFLAGS Options for the C compiler. The default value set by the
              vendor includes -g and the default optimization level (-O2
              usually, or -O0 if the DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS environment variable
              defines noopt).
       CPPFLAGS
              Options for the C preprocessor. Default value: empty.
       CXXFLAGS
              Options for the C++ compiler. Same as CFLAGS.
       OBJCFLAGS
              Options for the Objective C compiler. Same as CFLAGS.
       OBJCXXFLAGS
              Options for the Objective C++ compiler. Same as CXXFLAGS.
       GCJFLAGS
              Options for the GNU Java compiler (gcj). A subset of CFLAGS.
       FFLAGS Options for the Fortran 77 compiler. A subset of CFLAGS.
       FCFLAGS
              Options for the Fortran 9x compiler. Same as FFLAGS.
       LDFLAGS
              Options passed to the compiler when linking executables or
              shared objects (if the linker is called directly, then -Wl and
              , have to be stripped from these options). Default value:
              empty.
       New flags might be added in the future if the need arises (for
       example to support other languages).

FEATURE AREAS         top

       Each area feature can be enabled and disabled in the
       DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS and DEB_BUILD_MAINT_OPTIONS environment variable's
       area value with the ‘+’ and ‘-’ modifier.  For example, to enable the
       hardening “pie” feature and disable the “fortify” feature you can do
       this in debian/rules:
         export DEB_BUILD_MAINT_OPTIONS=hardening=+pie,-fortify
       The special feature all (valid in any area) can be used to enable or
       disable all area features at the same time.  Thus disabling
       everything in the hardening area and enabling only “format” and
       “fortify” can be achieved with:
         export DEB_BUILD_MAINT_OPTIONS=hardening=-all,+format,+fortify
   qa
       Several compile-time options (detailed below) can be used to help
       detect problems in the source code or build system.
       bug    This setting (disabled by default) adds any warning option
              that reliably detects problematic source code. The warnings
              are fatal.  The only currently supported flags are CFLAGS and
              CXXFLAGS with flags set to -Werror=array-bounds,
              -Werror=clobbered, -Werror=implicit-function-declaration and
              -Werror=volatile-register-var.
       canary This setting (disabled by default) adds dummy canary options
              to the build flags, so that the build logs can be checked for
              how the build flags propagate and to allow finding any
              omission of normal build flag settings.  The only currently
              supported flags are CPPFLAGS, CFLAGS, OBJCFLAGS, CXXFLAGS and
              OBJCXXFLAGS with flags set to -D__DEB_CANARY_flag_random-id__,
              and LDFLAGS set to -Wl,-z,deb-canary-random-id.
   sanitize
       Several compile-time options (detailed below) can be used to help
       sanitize a resulting binary against memory corruptions, memory leaks,
       use after free, threading data races and undefined behavior bugs.
       address
              This setting (disabled by default) adds -fsanitize=address to
              LDFLAGS and -fsanitize=address -fno-omit-frame-pointer to
              CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS.
       thread This setting (disabled by default) adds -fsanitize=thread to
              CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS and LDFLAGS.
       leak   This setting (disabled by default) adds -fsanitize=leak to
              LDFLAGS. It gets automatically disabled if either the address
              or the thread features are enabled, as they imply it.
       undefined
              This setting (disabled by default) adds -fsanitize=undefined
              to CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS and LDFLAGS.
   hardening
       Several compile-time options (detailed below) can be used to help
       harden a resulting binary against memory corruption attacks, or
       provide additional warning messages during compilation.  Except as
       noted below, these are enabled by default for architectures that
       support them.
       format This setting (enabled by default) adds -Wformat
              -Werror=format-security to CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS, OBJCFLAGS and
              OBJCXXFLAGS.  This will warn about improper format string
              uses, and will fail when format functions are used in a way
              that represent possible security problems. At present, this
              warns about calls to printf and scanf functions where the
              format string is not a string literal and there are no format
              arguments, as in printf(foo); instead of printf("%s", foo);
              This may be a security hole if the format string came from
              untrusted input and contains ‘%n’.
       fortify
              This setting (enabled by default) adds -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 to
              CPPFLAGS. During code generation the compiler knows a great
              deal of information about buffer sizes (where possible), and
              attempts to replace insecure unlimited length buffer function
              calls with length-limited ones. This is especially useful for
              old, crufty code.  Additionally, format strings in writable
              memory that contain ‘%n’ are blocked. If an application
              depends on such a format string, it will need to be worked
              around.
              Note that for this option to have any effect, the source must
              also be compiled with -O1 or higher. If the environment
              variable DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS contains noopt, then fortify
              support will be disabled, due to new warnings being issued by
              glibc 2.16 and later.
       stackprotector
              This setting (enabled by default if stackprotectorstrong is
              not in use) adds -fstack-protector --param=ssp-buffer-size=4
              to CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS, OBJCFLAGS, OBJCXXFLAGS, GCJFLAGS, FFLAGS
              and FCFLAGS.  This adds safety checks against stack
              overwrites. This renders many potential code injection attacks
              into aborting situations. In the best case this turns code
              injection vulnerabilities into denial of service or into non-
              issues (depending on the application).
              This feature requires linking against glibc (or another
              provider of __stack_chk_fail), so needs to be disabled when
              building with -nostdlib or -ffreestanding or similar.
       stackprotectorstrong
              This setting (enabled by default) adds
              -fstack-protector-strong to CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS, OBJCFLAGS,
              OBJCXXFLAGS, GCJFLAGS, FFLAGS and FCFLAGS.  This is a stronger
              variant of stackprotector, but without significant performance
              penalties.
              Disabling stackprotector will also disable this setting.
              This feature has the same requirements as stackprotector, and
              in addition also requires gcc 4.9 and later.
       relro  This setting (enabled by default) adds -Wl,-z,relro to
              LDFLAGS.  During program load, several ELF memory sections
              need to be written to by the linker. This flags the loader to
              turn these sections read-only before turning over control to
              the program. Most notably this prevents GOT overwrite attacks.
              If this option is disabled, bindnow will become disabled as
              well.
       bindnow
              This setting (disabled by default) adds -Wl,-z,now to LDFLAGS.
              During program load, all dynamic symbols are resolved,
              allowing for the entire PLT to be marked read-only (due to
              relro above). The option cannot become enabled if relro is not
              enabled.
       pie    This setting (enabled by default since dpkg 1.18.11, and
              injected by default by gcc on the amd64, arm64, armel, armhf,
              i386, mips, mipsel, mips64el, ppc64el and s390x Debian
              architectures) adds the required options if needed to enable
              or disable PIE. When enabled and injected by gcc, adds
              nothing. When enabled and not injected by gcc, adds -fPIE to
              CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS, OBJCFLAGS, OBJCXXFLAGS, GCJFLAGS, FFLAGS and
              FCFLAGS, and -fPIE -pie to LDFLAGS. When disabled and injected
              by gcc, adds -fno-PIE to CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS, OBJCFLAGS,
              OBJCXXFLAGS, GCJFLAGS, FFLAGS and FCFLAGS, and -fno-PIE
              -no-pie to LDFLAGS.
              Position Independent Executable are needed to take advantage
              of Address Space Layout Randomization, supported by some
              kernel versions. While ASLR can already be enforced for data
              areas in the stack and heap (brk and mmap), the code areas
              must be compiled as position-independent. Shared libraries
              already do this (-fPIC), so they gain ASLR automatically, but
              binary .text regions need to be build PIE to gain ASLR. When
              this happens, ROP (Return Oriented Programming) attacks are
              much harder since there are no static locations to bounce off
              of during a memory corruption attack.
              PIE is not compatible with -fPIC, so in general care must be
              taken when building shared objects. But because the PIE flags
              emitted get injected via gcc specs files, it should always be
              safe to unconditionally set them regardless of the object type
              being compiled or linked.
              Static libraries can be used by programs or other shared
              libraries.  Depending on the flags used to compile all the
              objects within a static library, these libraries will be
              usable by different sets of objects:
              none   Cannot be linked into a PIE program, nor a shared
                     library.
              -fPIE  Can be linked into any program, but not a shared
                     library (recommended).
              -fPIC  Can be linked into any program and shared library.
              If there is a need to set these flags manually, bypassing the
              gcc specs injection, there are several things to take into
              account. Unconditionally and explicitly passing -fPIE, -fpie
              or -pie to a build-system using libtool is safe as these flags
              will get stripped when building shared libraries.  Otherwise
              on projects that build both programs and shared libraries you
              might need to make sure that when building the shared
              libraries -fPIC is always passed last (so that it overrides
              any previous -PIE) to compilation flags such as CFLAGS, and
              -shared is passed last (so that it overrides any previous
              -pie) to linking flags such as LDFLAGS. Note: This should not
              be needed with the default gcc specs machinery.
              Additionally, since PIE is implemented via a general register,
              some register starved architectures (but not including i386
              anymore since optimizations implemented in gcc >= 5) can see
              performance losses of up to 15% in very text-segment-heavy
              application workloads; most workloads see less than 1%.
              Architectures with more general registers (e.g. amd64) do not
              see as high a worst-case penalty.
   reproducible
       The compile-time options detailed below can be used to help improve
       build reproducibility or provide additional warning messages during
       compilation. Except as noted below, these are enabled by default for
       architectures that support them.
       timeless
              This setting (enabled by default) adds -Wdate-time to
              CPPFLAGS.  This will cause warnings when the __TIME__,
              __DATE__ and __TIMESTAMP__ macros are used.
       fixdebugpath
              This setting (enabled by default) adds
              -fdebug-prefix-map=BUILDPATH=.  to CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS,
              OBJCFLAGS, OBJCXXFLAGS, GCJFLAGS, FFLAGS and FCFLAGS where
              BUILDPATH is set to the top-level directory of the package
              being built.  This has the effect of removing the build path
              from any generated debug symbols.

ENVIRONMENT         top

       There are 2 sets of environment variables doing the same operations,
       the first one (DEB_flag_op) should never be used within debian/rules.
       It's meant for any user that wants to rebuild the source package with
       different build flags. The second set (DEB_flag_MAINT_op) should only
       be used in debian/rules by package maintainers to change the
       resulting build flags.
       DEB_flag_SET
       DEB_flag_MAINT_SET
              This variable can be used to force the value returned for the
              given flag.
       DEB_flag_STRIP
       DEB_flag_MAINT_STRIP
              This variable can be used to provide a space separated list of
              options that will be stripped from the set of flags returned
              for the given flag.
       DEB_flag_APPEND
       DEB_flag_MAINT_APPEND
              This variable can be used to append supplementary options to
              the value returned for the given flag.
       DEB_flag_PREPEND
       DEB_flag_MAINT_PREPEND
              This variable can be used to prepend supplementary options to
              the value returned for the given flag.
       DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS
       DEB_BUILD_MAINT_OPTIONS
              These variables can be used by a user or maintainer to
              disable/enable various area features that affect build flags.
              The DEB_BUILD_MAINT_OPTIONS variable overrides any setting in
              the DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS feature areas.  See the FEATURE AREAS
              section for details.
       DEB_VENDOR
              This setting defines the current vendor.  If not set, it will
              discover the current vendor by reading
              /usr/local/etc/dpkg/origins/default.
       DEB_BUILD_PATH
              This variable sets the build path (since dpkg 1.18.8) to use
              in features such as fixdebugpath so that they can be
              controlled by the caller.  This variable is currently Debian
              and derivatives-specific.

FILES         top

   Configuration files
       /usr/local/etc/dpkg/buildflags.conf
              System wide configuration file.
       $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/dpkg/buildflags.conf or
       $HOME/.config/dpkg/buildflags.conf
              User configuration file.
   Packaging support
       /usr/local/share/dpkg/buildflags.mk
              Makefile snippet that will load (and optionally export) all
              flags supported by dpkg-buildflags into variables (since dpkg
              1.16.1).

EXAMPLES         top

       To pass build flags to a build command in a makefile:
           $(MAKE) $(shell dpkg-buildflags --export=cmdline)
           ./configure $(shell dpkg-buildflags --export=cmdline)
       To set build flags in a shell script or shell fragment, eval can be
       used to interpret the output and to export the flags in the
       environment:
           eval "$(dpkg-buildflags --export=sh)" && make
       or to set the positional parameters to pass to a command:
           eval "set -- $(dpkg-buildflags --export=cmdline)"
           for dir in a b c; do (cd $dir && ./configure "$@" && make); done
   Usage in debian/rules
       You should call dpkg-buildflags or include buildflags.mk from the
       debian/rules file to obtain the needed build flags to pass to the
       build system.  Note that older versions of dpkg-buildpackage (before
       dpkg 1.16.1) exported these flags automatically. However, you should
       not rely on this, since this breaks manual invocation of
       debian/rules.
       For packages with autoconf-like build systems, you can pass the
       relevant options to configure or make(1) directly, as shown above.
       For other build systems, or when you need more fine-grained control
       about which flags are passed where, you can use --get. Or you can
       include buildflags.mk instead, which takes care of calling
       dpkg-buildflags and storing the build flags in make variables.
       If you want to export all buildflags into the environment (where they
       can be picked up by your build system):
           DPKG_EXPORT_BUILDFLAGS = 1
           include /usr/local/share/dpkg/buildflags.mk
       For some extra control over what is exported, you can manually export
       the variables (as none are exported by default):
           include /usr/local/share/dpkg/buildflags.mk
           export CPPFLAGS CFLAGS LDFLAGS
       And you can of course pass the flags to commands manually:
           include /usr/local/share/dpkg/buildflags.mk
           build-arch:
                $(CC) -o hello hello.c $(CPPFLAGS) $(CFLAGS) $(LDFLAGS)

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the dpkg (Debian Package Manager) project.
       Information about the project can be found at 
       ⟨https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/⟩.  If you have a bug report for
       this manual page, see 
       ⟨http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?src=dpkg⟩.  This page
       was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository 
       ⟨git://git.debian.org/git/dpkg/dpkg.git⟩ on 2017-07-05.  If you dis‐
       cover any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you
       believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or
       you have corrections or improvements to the information in this
       COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail
       to man-pages@man7.org
1.18.15-3-ga2ef                  1970-01-01               dpkg-buildflags(1)

Pages that refer to this page: dpkg-buildpackage(1)