[sclug] Ubuntu packaging help

[Leon Ward leonward]

I should have responded to those that were kind enough to reach out both on and off-list with some links to useful reading. I do plan to turn up tonight hoping that I can find someone to dig into some details of Ubuntu PPAs and good or best practice.

Cheers

-L 

> On 1 Apr 2015, at 23:52, Will Dickson <wrd at glaurung.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> On 26/03/15 18:13, Leon Ward (leonward) wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I?m trying to work on packaging for a couple of projects and I?ve got a bunch of questions.
> 
> Quite frankly I?m trying to work out where to start (yes I?ve read the Ubuntu packaging guide)
> and good some practice advice.
> 
> FWIW I've managed to build a .deb for some of my own software (Java in my case, so perhaps somewhat atypical), and found these links helpful:
> 
> * Java / ant packaging tool (probably only useful if you're packaging a java application):
> 
> https://github.com/tcurdt/jdeb
> 
> * A much simpler HOWTO than anything I could find from either Debian or Ubuntu:
> 
> http://tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/Debian-Binary-Package-Building-HOWTO/#AEN48
> 
> * Useful links into Debian policy manual - describes various control file fields which you'll need to populate:
> 
> https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#s-f-Version
> https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive.html#s-subsections
> 
> 
> A good place to start is to know that a .deb is just an ar archive in disguise (ar is like tar only more limited and a different format; I'd never heard of it until I started digging into this lot): pick a plausible-looking victim from /var/cache/apt/archives, then use ar to unpack it and take a look inside.
> 
> HTH
> 
> Will.
>