Building binary deb packages: a practical guide

#1

Post by tblr » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 8:17 AM UTC

Building binary deb packages: a practical guide
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Re: Building binary deb packages: a practical guide

#2

Post by Athas » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 7:13 PM UTC

I think this guide glosses over the most difficult aspect: writing a package whose executables are generated reasonably reproducibly, using tools from other Debian packages. I've been a satisfied Debian user for over ten years, but I gave up on trying to package my own software. I could certainly figure out how to manually create a `.deb` with an executable and some man pages, but not how to automate the creation of that `.deb` in a way that lives up to my expectations of quality.

In contrast, I managed to submit software to Homebrew after two weeks of macOS, and to Nixpkgs within two days of running NixOS.

Re: Building binary deb packages: a practical guide

#3

Post by infinity0 » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 7:15 PM UTC

It should be noted that none of this article applies to actual development that goes on in the Debian distribution from https://www.debian.org

Official Debian development, being FOSS oriented, proceeds from Debian source packages instead, and one never creates a binary package from scratch as described in the article. Instead, we use `dpkg-buildpackage` and other similar tools. The creation of the source package is the hard part, having to follow all the aspects of Debian policy, including technical matters around quality.

Re: Building binary deb packages: a practical guide

#4

Post by infinity0 » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 7:32 PM UTC

Athas wrote: post #2

I think this guide glosses over the most difficult aspect: writing a package whose executables are generated reasonably reproducibly, using tools from other Debian packages. I've been a satisfied Debian user for over ten years, but I gave up on trying to package my own software. I could certainly figure out how to manually create a `.deb` with an executable and some man pages, but not how to automate the creation of…

As I mentioned in the other comment, the creation of a Debian source package has a lot of barriers, some of them good and for quality purposes, some of them bad and due to historical cruft. Documentation is also not very newbie-friendly. The actual automatic reproduction of a binary from a source package is simple - `dpkg-buildpackage`.

The tradeoff you get with other distributions being quick, is less quality assurance. Also, Debian still has a policy of working on 10 architectures, and this slows things down significantly sometimes. The other distributions you mentioned don't have this constraint.

Re: Building binary deb packages: a practical guide

#5

Post by exabrial » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 7:39 PM UTC

We use the JDeb maven plugin to package up our one-jar. Those are uploaded using Maven Wagon to a Nexus repository that our Ubuntu servers look at. It's beautiful how frictionless our deploys are.

Re: Building binary deb packages: a practical guide

#6

Post by pizza234 » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 7:55 PM UTC

Athas wrote: post #2

I think this guide glosses over the most difficult aspect: writing a package whose executables are generated reasonably reproducibly, using tools from other Debian packages. I've been a satisfied Debian user for over ten years, but I gave up on trying to package my own software. I could certainly figure out how to manually create a `.deb` with an executable and some man pages, but not how to automate the creation of…

> but not how to automate the creation of that `.deb` in a way that lives up to my expectations of quality.

Can you clarify what do you exactly mean with this?

Re: Building binary deb packages: a practical guide

#7

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 7:57 PM UTC

infinity0 wrote: post #3

It should be noted that none of this article applies to actual development that goes on in the Debian distribution from https://www.debian.org Official Debian development, being FOSS oriented, proceeds from Debian source packages instead, and one never creates a binary package from scratch as described in the article. Instead, we use `dpkg-buildpackage` and other similar tools. The creation of the source package is t…

[deleted]

Re: Building binary deb packages: a practical guide

#8

Post by Athas » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 8:02 PM UTC

pizza234 wrote: post #6

Athas wrote: post #2

I think this guide glosses over the most difficult aspect: writing a package whose executables are generated reasonably reproducibly, using tools from other Debian packages. I've been a satisfied Debian user for over ten years, but I gave up on trying to package my own software. I could certainly figure out how to manually create a `.deb` with an executable and some man pages, but not how to automate the creation of…

> but not how to automate the creation of that `.deb` in a way that lives up to my expectations of quality. Can you clarify what do you exactly mean with this?

Basically what infinity0 described in his sibling comments. I want to have a source package that can be used to build the binary package in a deterministic and reproducible way.

Re: Building binary deb packages: a practical guide

#9

Post by raziel2p » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 8:09 PM UTC

I still go to FPM (https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm) for any distro-native packaging needs I have.

Re: Building binary deb packages: a practical guide

#10

Post by pizza234 » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 8:10 PM UTC

Athas wrote: post #8

pizza234 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but not how to automate the creation of that `.deb` in a way that lives up to my expectations of quality. Can you clarify what do you exactly mean with this?

Basically what infinity0 described in his sibling comments. I want to have a source package that can be used to build the binary package in a deterministic and reproducible way.

This post describes how to do that, via PPAs: https://is.gd/Eu55IG.