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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