Re: Building my own packages

[Alex Mestiashvili <amestia@rsh2.donotuse.de>]

On 11/4/20 3:32 PM, Victor Sudakov wrote:
> Dear Colleagues,
>
> As a person with the FreeBSD background, I'm used to building my own
> packages with the exact build options I need (those include exim, nginx,
> samba, clamav and many others). FreeBSD has a good infrastructure for
> this (ports tree, poudriere et al.)
>
> Where can I learn to do a similar thing for Debian? I'd like to have my
> own package repository which:
>
> 1. Keeps my local patches and configure/build options.
> 2. Gets updated and recompiled when the main Debian repository gets updated.
> 3. Can have a higher preference for my Debian systems than the default Debian repositories.
>
> I know this can be done because I use some vendor repositories (zabbix,
> consul etc) but I need the tools and knowledge.
>
> What would you advise me to read?

That's actually a good question and I'd like to see a how-to myself.
BTW, used to build FreeBSD packages at the time of FeeBSD 4.5-4.11 :)

I personally use reprepro for my repository, but the packages I build 
manually with cowbuilder/pbuilder and then upload to the repository 
managed by reprepro.

For 1. and 2. one option would be a gitlab instance with a CI pipeline ( 
or just a git repo with post-receive hooks ) which would rebuild the 
source package if the new version is pushed to the repository. Once this 
is done, uploading to reprepro isn't a big deal I guess. Still you might 
need manual intervention if you sign the packages.

Best,
Alex