createdeb: A simple way to create Debian packages

createdeb generates Debian packages from simple package descriptors.

Internally createdeb acts as a frontend to equivs-build.

`debdesc` files

A debdesc file describes the content a deb package. It is used to state the name and the version of the package, its dependencies, who is its maintainer, under what licence it is licensed and, most important, what files should be in the package and where they should be installed.

A simple debdesc file for a metapackage that only declares dependencies looks like this:

Section: metapackages
Priority: important

Package: demo-metapackage
Maintainer: Mel Shmoe <mel@example.com>

Description: A demo metapackage

Depends:
 libdemo,
 demo-client

Recommends:
 demo-config

A createdeb file for a more interesting package that installs new files and modifies existing files would look like the following:

Section: admin
Priority: important

Package: demo-config
Maintainer: Mel Shmoe <mel@example.com>

Description: A demo configuration package

Depends:
 demo-metapackage


Copy: maintenance.sh /usr/share/demo-config/
Copy: check.sh /usr/share/demo-config/

Diff: /etc/login.defs

The Copy and Diff directives

In addition to the normal debian/control directives, createdeb recognizes also two additional directives: Copy, to copy files to specific locations, and Diff, to automatically generate patches of existing files.

The Copy directive

The Copy directive requires a source file and a destination directory:

Copy: <file> <directory>

The file to be copied must be placed in the directory <package-name>/files/.

The Diff directive

The Diff directive requires the absolute path of the file to be patched:

Diff: <full-path>

The Diff directive requires the presence of two files: the original file, as will be found installed, and the modified file.

The path of the original file must be

<package-name>/diff/<full-path>.orig

while the path of the modified file must be

<package-name>/diff/<full-path>

createdeb will take care of creating the needed patches and adding the patching instruction to the package control file.

Creating deb packages

equivs-build (up to version 2.0.9 included) has a bug that prevents createdeb from producing working packages. Please follow the workaround instructions to avoid problems.

Put all your debdesc package descriptors in a directoy, then use GNU make to run the Makefile found in the directory where you downloaded createdeb.

$ ls .debdesc
demo-config.debdesc
demo-config/
$ alias createdeb="make -f ~/apps/createdeb/Makefile"
$ createdeb
$ ls repo/
demo-1.0_all.deb Packages.gz

Once built, the packages can be copied to a remote or local repository using the target upload.

$ createdeb upload REMOTE_REPO_DIR=mel@example.org:/var/repo

Author

Gioele Barabucci http://svario.it/gioele

Licence

This is free software released into the public domain (CC0 license).

See the COPYING file or http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ for more details.

gioele/createdeb