Misadventures in GUI package-building

Posted Sep 2, 2011 16:17 UTC (Fri) by daglwn (guest, #65432)
In reply to: Misadventures in GUI package-building by dlang
Parent article: Misadventures in GUI package-building

So if I'm understanding this correctly, there's no easy way to "edit" the package to make it uploadable as the control files don't exist anywhere except in the package itself.

I suppose I could unpack the package, grab the control files and put them in the source repository. That would give me some sort of start. But ultimately I will have to use the official Debian tools to create a real package.

Is that right?

Misadventures in GUI package-building

Posted Sep 2, 2011 18:57 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (3 responses)

the control files do exist on the filesystem after you run checkinstall, so you don't have to open the package to get at them.

I'm not really sure what you consider a "real package" that you need the official debian tools to create. can you expand on what the requirements are for a "real package"

I am saying that I don't think you can just run checkinstall on an arbitrary source tree and consider the result ready to be uploaded to the debian archives

Misadventures in GUI package-building

Posted Sep 2, 2011 20:48 UTC (Fri) by daglwn (guest, #65432) [Link] (2 responses)

> the control files do exist on the filesystem after you run checkinstall, so you don't have to open the package to get at them.

Cool. That makes things easier.

> I'm not really sure what you consider a "real package" that you need the official debian tools to create. can you expand on what the requirements are for a "real package"

One that is uploadable to the archive.

> I am saying that I don't think you can just run checkinstall on an arbitrary source tree and consider the result ready to be uploaded to the debian archives

Right. That's what I was trying to get at and it's the answer I expected. But at least it provides a starting point.

Misadventures in GUI package-building

Posted Sep 2, 2011 21:27 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

if you consider that the package would need to be different for each different distro (and likely for different releases of the same distro), I don't know how any packaging tool could reach the point of 'run it and upload it to the distro repository'

for that matter, I would have assumed that the distros don't take binary uploads anyway. shouldn't they all be setup where you upload the source and a series of instructions and their build servers create the binary packages for each of their several target architectures?

there is not as much variation in distros that accept .deb packages, but if you look at all the distros that use .rpm packages, the number of things that would be different from one to the other seems like it would be very significant, and a lot of it would be things that a packaging tool would not know about (what the the correct version of gcc to use, etc)

Misadventures in GUI package-building

Posted Sep 7, 2011 11:45 UTC (Wed) by robbe (guest, #16131) [Link]

> if you consider that the package would need to be different for each different distro [...]
I can imagine a profile-based solution. But it'd probably be much maintenance work for little gain.

> for that matter, I would have assumed that the distros don't take binary uploads anyway.
Debian used to take source+binary uploads. There has been discussion to switch to source-only uploads, but the risk of maintainers not even compile-testing revisions that supposedly contained only trivial fixes was deemed too high. So the current regime, AFAIK, is to requier source+binary, but throw away the binary.