On Fri, Mar 10, 2006 at 10:35:22PM -0000, StealthMonger wrote: > Is there a document describing software packaging good practices for > general use, not specific to Debian, preferably in electronic form? Policy describes how Debian packages should look. If you don't intend to get the package into Debian, it's still a good idea to follow those rules, because the users which will install the package want a consistent system (and the fact that Debian packages follow Policy is the reason that they usually get it, too). > Debian discourages creating Debian-native packages: "This type of > packaging is only appropriate for the debian-specific packages, which > will never be useful in another distribution." [1] That's right. The idea is that packaging is Debian's business, and upstream shouldn't need to bother with it. Also, non-Debian users shouldn't be confused by a bunch of extra files in the source that do nothing for them. So the "release tarball" should not contain any packaging stuff, as far as Debian is concerned. (Yes, I know other distributions have different opinions about this.) > But creating it for other distributions requires some knowledge of what > those other distributions expect of a package. I don't know what you mean with that exactly. If you're referring to the fact that they need files in your release tarball, that's IMO a bug in their packaging process. What should be in that file? I don't know, ask them. ;-) Debian tries not to put any limits on the way you wish to release your source. So if you make a proper Debian package, then the foo_version.orig.tar.gz should be usable directly for any other distribution as well. (In fact it is of course the other way around: you use your release tarball directly for Debian.) There currently is a limit that it must be .tar.gz, and not .zip or .tar.bz2. I think this is something that will be fixed in the new (not yet working) package format. > The current interest here is primarily in packages consisting of shell > scripts, as opposed to compilable code, but presumably the question > arises in either case. For packaging it doesn't matter much what it is. In case of shell scripts, your compile rule will be short. ;-) As an aside: remember to use Architecture: all, not any, for such architecture-independent packages. Not that it matters much if you don't upload them to the archive. :-) I hope this answers your question. If not, please rephrase it. ;-) Thanks, Bas Wijnen -- I encourage people to send encrypted e-mail (see http://www.gnupg.org). If you have problems reading my e-mail, use a better reader. Please send the central message of e-mails as plain text in the message body, not as HTML and definitely not as MS Word. Please do not use the MS Word format for attachments either. For more information, see http://129.125.47.90/e-mail.html
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