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Completely agree with you in regards to Debian packaging. I googled around and found at least 5 different official guides (on the debian wiki) all using slightl

Completely agree with you in regards to Debian packaging. I googled around and found at least 5 different official guides (on the debian wiki) all using slightly different approaches. I tried 3 of them before giving up, as none of them seemed to work.

justinsaccount 11y ago
Oh? The basics are not that hard. dh_make will do most of the work for you.
- takluyver 11y ago
  The basics may not be that hard, but the multitude of overlapping tools and frameworks that sit on top of them and try to make things easier is seriously confusing and offputting. For instance, there are build tools called dpkg-buildpackage, debuild, git-buildpackage, pbuilder, cowbuilder, and doubtless some others I've forgotten about. Different guides will recommend different ones. Once you've made a package, you either try to get it into Debian, or put it in your own repository, both of which come with additional challenges. I've done some Debian packaging before - both to go into Debian and to put in PPAs. I've given it up: the effort was too much and the rewards too little.
  - chungy 11y ago
    Sad thing is that this is 100% a problem related to the tools for building Debian packages (same goes for RPM). The tools can be replaced without sacrificing binary compatibility at all. If any aspiring hackers are around, I suggest taking a look at Arch and its makepkg/PKGBUILD tools. Pretty much a simple shell script to define a package, and a uniform tool to build it.
- vacri 11y ago
  Debian packaging basics aren't hard once you know them, but starting from scratch, it's hard to collate the information. There's lots of stale information out there (including the debian wiki) and disagreement about how to do it - debuild? dh_make? dpkg directly? tar/ar manually? Similarly, if you want a package up something without a Makefile, you may as well go home. My first packaging attempt was basically to install a tarball at a location (in-house use only), and it wasn't clear that I had to make a Makefile to do this first. And then you get introduced to the bizarre world of make with all of it's idiosyncratic rules and behaviours. Then you get to play with all the dpkg control files, and if you're using debuild, you have to avoid the lintchecker - because you can override lint rules... but the lint profile then disables overrides for some useful ones (the "install to /opt" rule gives me lots of spam). So now you need to learn about the lint-checker so you can do your own profile (or just disable it). Then, as takluyver says above, you get to add it to a repo so systems can access it... Once you know all this stuff, it seems pretty simple, but getting over that hump is difficult.

justinsaccount 11y ago

Oh? The basics are not that hard. dh_make will do most of the work for you.

takluyver 11y ago
The basics may not be that hard, but the multitude of overlapping tools and frameworks that sit on top of them and try to make things easier is seriously confusing and offputting. For instance, there are build tools called dpkg-buildpackage, debuild, git-buildpackage, pbuilder, cowbuilder, and doubtless some others I've forgotten about. Different guides will recommend different ones. Once you've made a package, you either try to get it into Debian, or put it in your own repository, both of which come with additional challenges. I've done some Debian packaging before - both to go into Debian and to put in PPAs. I've given it up: the effort was too much and the rewards too little.
- chungy 11y ago
  Sad thing is that this is 100% a problem related to the tools for building Debian packages (same goes for RPM). The tools can be replaced without sacrificing binary compatibility at all. If any aspiring hackers are around, I suggest taking a look at Arch and its makepkg/PKGBUILD tools. Pretty much a simple shell script to define a package, and a uniform tool to build it.
vacri 11y ago
Debian packaging basics aren't hard once you know them, but starting from scratch, it's hard to collate the information. There's lots of stale information out there (including the debian wiki) and disagreement about how to do it - debuild? dh_make? dpkg directly? tar/ar manually? Similarly, if you want a package up something without a Makefile, you may as well go home. My first packaging attempt was basically to install a tarball at a location (in-house use only), and it wasn't clear that I had to make a Makefile to do this first. And then you get introduced to the bizarre world of make with all of it's idiosyncratic rules and behaviours. Then you get to play with all the dpkg control files, and if you're using debuild, you have to avoid the lintchecker - because you can override lint rules... but the lint profile then disables overrides for some useful ones (the "install to /opt" rule gives me lots of spam). So now you need to learn about the lint-checker so you can do your own profile (or just disable it). Then, as takluyver says above, you get to add it to a repo so systems can access it... Once you know all this stuff, it seems pretty simple, but getting over that hump is difficult.