Debian Packaging Tutorial – Feedback Welcome • Hacker News Board

Re: Debian Packaging Tutorial – Feedback Welcome

#21

Post by SFjulie1 » Sun, Jan 10, 2016, 4:19 PM UTC

Having had to rebuild debian/foedora/RH package, this tutorial is lacking all the specifity of debian: bureaucracy, complexity, rigidity and breaking things.

If you make a package for openssl, don't forget you are a packager, you know nothing of coding, but please reduce the entropy in the name of security.

This tutorial is bad, it demystifies the fact that a package is simply an archive with entry points for code pre/post inst/rm, and that users should be FREE (like in free software) to make their own easily.

It is amazing that with an organizational culture debian achieved to void their own manifesto. Microsoft could learn from them.

Lived long enough to see the good guys turn into the bad guys.

Re: Debian Packaging Tutorial – Feedback Welcome

#22

Post by brudgers » Sun, Jan 10, 2016, 4:31 PM UTC

zlatan_todoric wrote: post #6

rahiel wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If on the other hand your goal is not to get a package in Debian, but only to quickly make a deb file, check out fpm: https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm .

Yep, the tutorial name should be how to quickly (low quality) create a deb package from simple source. :) Also you can use equivs for creating quick (dummy?) packages :D

The link to other resources and the expertise expressed in the head comment of this thread was helpful. The insults are not.

Re: Debian Packaging Tutorial – Feedback Welcome

#23

Post by scrollaway » Sun, Jan 10, 2016, 4:48 PM UTC

zlatan_todoric wrote: post #20

scrollaway wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are conflating curation/QA and packaging. Packaging itself should not care about the quality of the packages. It's well known that the debian repositories are extremely well reviewed and tested. But you could have that with Arch's packaging system as well. When someone builds a package themselves however, they are not expecting Debian's QA & testing nor are they usually interested in it. But a package, untested a…

You see, there is where you mistake. Debian official packaging is about Quality of package. Lintian checks for example is your library really a library or it maybe contains scripts, did you make a mistake in description (simple letter mistake), did you miss new copyright files (or change in copyright of the same). There is also a reason why it suggests building in clean chroots, installation in same clean environment…

Arch does have a lot of that. Not all of it, but it does have clean chroot building, gpg signing, linting etc. Mostly, arch does less testing as the philosophy is "trust upstream".

However, none of this is required for unofficial packages. You can do it, but you don't have to. This is where I'm saying you're conflating two different things - QA and packaging are separate.

Please don't get me wrong, I love debian and they do an incredible service to the Linux community with their testing. But why force it all on users that just want to build a simple package instead of doing make install as root?

Re: Debian Packaging Tutorial – Feedback Welcome

#24

Post by zlatan_todoric » Sun, Jan 10, 2016, 5:16 PM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #23

zlatan_todoric wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You see, there is where you mistake. Debian official packaging is about Quality of package. Lintian checks for example is your library really a library or it maybe contains scripts, did you make a mistake in description (simple letter mistake), did you miss new copyright files (or change in copyright of the same). There is also a reason why it suggests building in clean chroots, installation in same clean environment…

Arch does have a lot of that. Not all of it, but it does have clean chroot building, gpg signing, linting etc. Mostly, arch does less testing as the philosophy is "trust upstream". However, none of this is required for unofficial packages. You can do it, but you don't have to. This is where I'm saying you're conflating two different things - QA and packaging are separate. Please don't get me wrong, I love debian and…

Again, QA is part of Debian packaging (just check all the debian lintian checks https://lintian.debian.org/tags-all.html - and you do officially run lintian on your packages).

Again, no one is forcing you to do official Debian packaging if you want to create simple deb for your purposes and it was mentioned in this thread by other and me several times (and several tools).

Re: Debian Packaging Tutorial – Feedback Welcome

#25

Post by perlgeek » Sun, Jan 10, 2016, 5:24 PM UTC

If you use the standard debhelper toolchain instead, you get lots of stuff for free.

Want to ship a systemd service file? include "--with systemd" in the dh invocation in debian/rules (and add dh-systemd as a build dependency), and you can drop your system files in debian/yourpackage.service. The helper will do all the work for you like copying the service file to the right location, doing the "daemon-reload" to make sure it is read after it's changed, reload it after package installation, stop if when the package is uninstalled, and so on.

Want to create an empty directory? add it to debian/dirs. Want to install additional files? add them to debian/install.

Want to create a debian package from an existing perl module? "dh-make-perl --cpan The::Package".

And the nice thing is that all of these mechanisms are composable, and it is easy to override steps you want to customize.

At first, I found the standard debhelper toolchain to be complex too, but it actually makes simple things easy, and hard things possible.

Shameless plug: Yesterday I've blogged about debian packaging a simplistic Perl web application: http://perlgeek.de/blog-en/automating-deployments/2016-005-e... (not much Perl specific in there).

Re: Debian Packaging Tutorial – Feedback Welcome

#26

Post by regularfry » Sun, Jan 10, 2016, 7:24 PM UTC

zlatan_todoric wrote: post #9

regularfry wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Debian user , it's a fine tutorial. Not every .deb is built for distribution with Debian itself. The only change I'd make is to clarify that what's being built here is a "for personal use only" package. As to the debian.org guides, I've always found them obtuse precisely because they emphasise what you've got to do to get a package distributed, rather than the plain technical details of how they work.

Packaging tutorial shouldn't be technical details how deb package works but how you build one (if you want those details you can also find them in Debian documentation but in the end deb package is just an ar file with it's set of make file that satisfies the installation in specific distro - this is the simple explanation). And no, the tutorial is misleading because Debian packaging means doing it for Debian, while…

But the guides aren't just how you build a package. They're how you package something for official distribution. The requirements for the former aren't nearly as stringent as for the latter, and by obscuring the former behind the latter, Debian makes its packaging guides less useful.

Re: Debian Packaging Tutorial – Feedback Welcome

#27

Post by zlatan_todoric » Mon, Jan 11, 2016, 1:56 AM UTC

brudgers wrote: post #22

zlatan_todoric wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, the tutorial name should be how to quickly (low quality) create a deb package from simple source. :) Also you can use equivs for creating quick (dummy?) packages :D

The link to other resources and the expertise expressed in the head comment of this thread was helpful. The insults are not.

what insults?

Re: Debian Packaging Tutorial – Feedback Welcome

#28

Post by zlatan_todoric » Mon, Jan 11, 2016, 2:03 AM UTC

regularfry wrote: post #26

zlatan_todoric wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Packaging tutorial shouldn't be technical details how deb package works but how you build one (if you want those details you can also find them in Debian documentation but in the end deb package is just an ar file with it's set of make file that satisfies the installation in specific distro - this is the simple explanation). And no, the tutorial is misleading because Debian packaging means doing it for Debian, while…

But the guides aren't just how you build a package. They're how you package something for official distribution. The requirements for the former aren't nearly as stringent as for the latter, and by obscuring the former behind the latter, Debian makes its packaging guides less useful.

Debian packaging guides are less useful because they concentrate on how to build package for Debian?

And nobody is hiding from you any tutorial - Debian is an open community and the wiki is open to everyone so you can search for what you need but I really don't see the point in your sentences (are you saying that we should favorite somehow quick and dirty hacks instead of our strict high-quality ways of building packages? Because if yes, then Debian wouldn't be what it is today...)

Re: Debian Packaging Tutorial – Feedback Welcome

#29

Post by regularfry » Mon, Jan 11, 2016, 9:05 AM UTC

zlatan_todoric wrote: post #28

regularfry wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the guides aren't just how you build a package. They're how you package something for official distribution. The requirements for the former aren't nearly as stringent as for the latter, and by obscuring the former behind the latter, Debian makes its packaging guides less useful.

Debian packaging guides are less useful because they concentrate on how to build package for Debian ? And nobody is hiding from you any tutorial - Debian is an open community and the wiki is open to everyone so you can search for what you need but I really don't see the point in your sentences (are you saying that we should favorite somehow quick and dirty hacks instead of our strict high-quality ways of building pac…

Yes, that's exactly correct. Debian's tutorials are less generally useful because, to serve the specific goal of keeping Debian's packages high quality, they obscure what you can do behind what Debian thinks you should.

Re: Debian Packaging Tutorial – Feedback Welcome

#30

Post by zlatan_todoric » Mon, Jan 11, 2016, 12:53 PM UTC

regularfry wrote: post #29

zlatan_todoric wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debian packaging guides are less useful because they concentrate on how to build package for Debian ? And nobody is hiding from you any tutorial - Debian is an open community and the wiki is open to everyone so you can search for what you need but I really don't see the point in your sentences (are you saying that we should favorite somehow quick and dirty hacks instead of our strict high-quality ways of building pac…

Yes, that's exactly correct. Debian's tutorials are less generally useful because, to serve the specific goal of keeping Debian's packages high quality, they obscure what you can do behind what Debian thinks you should .

First of all (repeating myself again): there is a lot of documentation out there (already mentioned multiple times in this thread) how you can build debs quickly. Also, Debian tutorials are Debian tutorials and they should serve Debian primarily and not some third-party, but still you have all documentation on Debian wiki (and also manpages of specific packages) - you just need to do a bit of search.

Second: saying that Debian's tutorials are less useful because they have specific goal of high quality - makes me really sad. Debian is community and not corporation, so to see that community has higher standard then any corporation should be praised. Also Debian's packaging evolved over 20+ years by thousands of hackers (experts in their field) all over world in their unique collaboration. I am sure this should be taken as a pride that you can go on net an read such tutorials.

And really, if someone thinks he is technical but can't read few pages of not so demanding tutorial, then problem is in them because in software world you evolve every day and need to read and code a lot to keep a pace. Only problem that you could say is that maybe isn't that fun to read (because Debian wikis are old school so the sentences stretch through entire screen while today's web is focused on centering all which makes it a bit easy to read and so on).