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packaging buddycloud for debian



Hello,

I asked on debian-user where was a good place to ask for advice about building debian packages for the buddycloud project (see buddycloud.org), and they suggested here.

The project is one of several projects trying to create an alternative to facebook based on open protocols, federated servers, and free software. There are various components to the system, which we want to package for debian and ubuntu intially, and possibly after that for other distributions such as Fedora or CentOS.

I've offered to try to make an automatic build system which can download any new source releases and package them for different distros. I'm thinking that to begin with, we would be running our own apt archive which users can include in their sources.list; after that we could look at getting packages accepted into the different distributions' main releases.

I've done a bit of reading on building packages for debian, and I think I've got a rough idea of what is involved. I've also made a start on writing some scripts to handle the logic of building and packaging each project for different distros in a consistent way. These are documented here ( https://buddycloud.org/wiki/Packaging_System ), and there is an early version of the code here ( https://github.com/buddycloud/buddycloud-build ). The next thing I want to do is work through packaging one of the components (probably the web client) by hand, and then write scripts to handle this automatically.

There are a couple of questions I'd like to ask at this point:

- one is about dependencies of binary packages to be released for different distributions. I'm not sure whether a package needs to be built in exactly the same environment that it is intended to install to (e.g. by making a chrooted tree to build in), or whether you can package the same binary files for different distros just by making sure that the file locations, package control files and so on fit that distro. - the other question is about the scripts I'm writing - I'd just like to make sure that there isn't something out there already that can handle the whole process in this way. I've come across programs which can deal with parts of the process, but nothing that quite fits what we want. (I.e. a consistent framework for packaging several programs for different linux distros).

thanks for any help with this,

andy baxter.


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